Subject:
Taxes
To:
President Barack Obama
Sen. Mitch McConnell
Sen. Jim Bunning
Rep. Ed Whitfield
November 3, 2009
Thank you for a moment of your time.
I will try to make this brief and straightforward.
Understand, I am a physician in private practice, serving in a rural community, and should be doing well financially, but as I sit here tonight, I am struggling just to figure out how to pay my bills. I spent many, many years struggling to get through school and long hours of training. Few in our society are willing to make that degree of personal sacrifice. Now more than 25 years later including a long distinguished career in service to our country, I find I have more debt and less to live on than I have ever had, even during my training years. I live in a very modest home and the only car I have to drive is a 1996 Toyota with 250,000+ miles. It is not fancy, nor is much else I own. I try to live frugally and buy very little for myself. I provide a great deal of medical care for free and have been happy to try and help others in any way I can, but I still have to pay my bills and taxes.
Over the years I have seen reimbursements go down and down, malpractice go up and up and few willing to follow through on their personal responsibility. With the hard times that have fallen on so many and the push for medical reform, patients have generally come to the education that it is their right to free medical care and expect me to cover the costs, even though so many make absolutely no effort to contribute anything meaningful to society. Insurance companies, including government programs (particularly Medicare) likewise exhaust every excuse for paying out claims.
As providers, please understand, we are not responsible for runaway health care expenditures. I can barely pay my bills, but routinely see laboratories, hospitals, drug companies, medical suppliers and attorneys "making a killing" in outrageous and unjustifiable charges.
I have professional office space I have tried to sell for 2 years now and owe more than it is worth. I am particularly frustrated this evening as tax and property bills seem to be arriving daily with no end in site! I get some sort of City, County, State or Federal tax bills on almost a weekly basis, many I do not even understand or know what they are for! I feel like my total employment effort is to pay malpractice and taxes and I can't even see my way through those expenses any more, let alone how to feed my family and pay my mortgage!
Something has got to change! As I see it, we need to get rid of corruption in government and runaway greed in business, particularly as our tax dollars are used to fund it.
From my perspective, we desperately need TORT REFORM NOW and are way past the time this should have been resolved. We have very dedicated and committed health professionals in this country, who have all personally sacrificed much for the real benefit of society. It's been extremely rare that I have ever seen true negligence or intentional mismanagement of patients at their hands, but it is common that we see malpractice claims for frivolous and unjustified reasons apart from greed driving the insistence that "somebody has got to pay" for every life's misfortune!
And finally, more important than all the above, we have somehow got to get control of our runaway taxes! Please listen carefully. It's enough! NO NEW TAXES! No new taxes of any kind or in any disguise! Some way or another, if not on the first pass, on subsequent passes, you are managing to end up with virtually everything we make. No amount of tax increases will ever quench your insatiable drunkenness for more control and power disguised in expanding public programs. Of course we want to help those truly less fortunate, but fortunate is an act of God, not laziness! It's time to go through the pains of withdrawal. Wake up! We can not give everything to everybody, particularly for those who do not care to contribute or work when they are able. I think we have no moral responsibility for them. Yes, there is an epidemic of freeloading in our society! If you continue to espouse and support programs that encourage and profit these derelicts, then you are as guilty, corrupt, and freeloading as they! Simply squeezing more and more from those who do work is not survivable! Quit making excuses for taking more, and spend what you have better. Solve the problems with responsibility and not with more taxes! Do the job for which which you were elected.
Mayfield , KY
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