Every Friday, the Daily Texan editorial board will publish a selection of tweets and online comments culled from the Daily Texan website and the various Daily Texan Twitter accounts, along with direct submissions from readers. Submissions can be sent to [email protected]. 

Wrong on healthcare

I see your editorial group bemoans the idea that “Texas is sinking to the bottom in measures of national health care quality.” I am a physician. I can tell you after decades of work in medicine and becoming much more understanding of economics, history and politics, it’s a complex and simple issue at the same time. What I mean by that is, on the one hand, any American would be delighted to leap on a plane and have his cancer diagnosis addressed at the great Texas MD Anderson Hospital- no better place in the world to get such care. On the other hand medicine has needed reform, for example, some people find medical care too costly.  Our Democratic Party did not reform medicine, it radically transformed it, it crushed a giant complex and overall great system built up over decades. The simple part of it is what you students don’t understand. And what you don’t understand is this radicalism will make the problems dramatically worse. You don’t understand that the goods and services of medicine is just like the goods and services involved with cars, apples or Apple laptop computers. The best way, the most moral way, to create and distribute such goods services is by free market capitalism. 

What has happened over the past 50 years since FRD is that this American notion has been rejected by many Americans and replaced by essentially Marxist- based state control. This is the simple core of the problem. Now with Obamacare the problem has been made exponentially worse. The State takeover is almost complete. Just like with cars or food or computers that might be built and distributed, heaven forbid by the state, the goods and services of medicine will now dry up, become mediocre, and get a lot more expensive. Your freedom to decide with your doctors what is best for you individually will be almost gone as 15,000 new pages of laws come spewing forth from the enlightened in Washington. You worry about government getting into your reproductive issues? Now you’ll have government not only of your testicles and ovaries but government of your lungs and livers and hearts and kidneys.

 Most of you disagree and will keep supporting and voting for this Leftist un-American  “Hope and Change” nonsense. However, I and thousands of other doctors guarantee you, when you abandon our great American values like that of free market capitalism, you actually abandon hope and the once great bounty and excellence of American medicine. You’ll see. Elections do have great consequences. Brace yourselves for the world of the department of motor vehicles American medicine- a very sad image for our great country.

— Howard Sachs M.D., submitted via e-mail in response to “Horns Down: Texas failing in healthcare measures” 

Down with Davis

“She can’t detail her own life with honesty. what are you expecting?” 

— Twitter user @longhornblondie in response to the editorial “Davis’ education policy is short on specifics, just like her campaign” 

I’m more than a sofa

“As I accessed this page, a pop up assaulted my senses with an advertisement that asked the question, “What does your sofa say about YOU?” My sofa says nothing about me or Steve Sonnenberg or Rolando Hinojosa Smith or Ricardo Ainslie or many of the distinguished senior faculty members whose work is so richly and deeply human and who use their hearts and souls as well as their minds in order to make sure students have a chance to really know and feel what is what during their time on the Forty Acres.

Steve is a fine example of a dedicated humanist who has never been aware that there is any box he needs to think outside of.  His mind, heart and soul make clear that knowing who we are as human beings is what will ‘change the world’, not focusing on four-year graduation rates or whether the head football coach is brown or white or strong or weak. 

Steve’s work in the school of architecture, the Humanities Institute, spearheading the idea for a Veterans Park and Pavilion, and his teaching with me in a Plan II seminar and working with Plan II and other senior thesis writers and his concern that the new Medical School will have a serious humanistic component in its training are models for what it is to be a good citizen of our University community, our city, our state, our country and indeed our world.” 

— Tom Palaima, Professor of Classics, Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics, in response to the news article “Architecture professor honored for contribution to medical field”