During this contentious election season, please educate yourself. One way to do this would be to watch the three-part movie series called “Atlas Shrugged,” based upon the prophetic book written by Ayn Rand in 1957. It is available at the Bud Werner Memorial Library.

In response to Al Rosenthal’s letter on Oct. 27 regarding Amendment 69, I fervently disagree. When he stated that it is erroneous that “physicians will flee the state”, it is ironic, since some physicians are now going the “concierge” route. Concierge service, in the medical arena, means physicians offer their patients their services for an additional fee, over and above any insurance you have.

Locally, the newest concierge practice is charging $1,500 to 2,000 a year. Because of this, I can no longer afford my preferred doctor at Steamboat Family Medicine.

This is America, where businesses are free to do whatever is legally and ethically feasible to stay in business, while staying profitable. Therefore, I thoroughly understand and empathize with this business strategy.

However, while this business model is based upon capitalistic principles, which I applaud, it is forcing us into the Have’s and Have Not’s once again. For the well-to-do, they don’t have a problem with $2,000 per year and for those on the lower end, some local doctors still take the ever expanding Medicare and Medicaid patients.

What about the middle class? The people paying outrageous premiums with little value and unreachable deductibles. They have few options left.

Your answer, Mr. Rosenthal, is Amendment 69, which admittedly states, we don’t have all the details worked out just yet. Really?

That sounds like an open invitation for corruption, abuse, fraud and another bloated bureaucracy. A bureaucracy that us little peasants can pay for once again, albeit maybe not directly, but via our employers, that will then go out of business due to the high cost of actually doing business.

Everyone uses a cell phone. Does it cost $1,000? No.Why? Competition lowers prices. That is a proven fact time and again.

Amendment 69 pushes us to single payer, especially since most insurers have fled the state. The almighty nanny state, a.k.a. government, will take care of everything.

If health care was treated like car insurance, cell phones and other products, capitalism would work. Whenever government is involved, inefficiencies, waste, fraud and bureaucracies run rampant.

Once the agency is created, there is no eliminating the leviathan, ever. If we had only paid for a minimal BC/BS policy for those original 33 million identified without insurance, we wouldn’t be suffering under the heavy hand of the government hungrily waiting to control the collective, us.

In closing, the rebuttal to this letter will be that the government will fix it. Funny. The other argument will be what about fat cats at the top of the insurance companies (i.e. – the epi pen)?

In no way am I defending the loser CEOs who get paid $1000 a minute plus bonuses and stock options, however, in every form of government — capitalism, socialism and communism — what is the common denominator?

Man’s greed. It would be no different in any other system, the people in control, look out for themselves first. Let capitalism work, and the results would be better.

Take government out of the equation, not add more government.

Laura Case

Steamboat Springs