Ms. Learnard’s column on healthcare is so sadly misinformed, I wish I knew where to start.

Consider her claim that the American people should get healthcare just like Congress as a reason to support “Obama care.”

I hate to break the bad news to Ms. Learnard, but Senators Dodd and Kennedy have specifically excluded Congress from having to take part in the “Obama Care” plan. Her argument is a non-sequitur as the bill is currently written.

Worse is Ms. Learnard’s assertion that [since] all other nations have healthcare, we should too.

Leaving the obvious warnings from your mother about “everyone else is doing it,” Ms. Learnard omits the fact that the UK system is going bankrupt, the German system is rationing care, that on June 6 the Canadian Supreme Court — fed up with long waits — ruled people can go to private providers.

Indeed, Health Canada has their wait times posted on their own website. Sometimes as long as six months for a CT scan.

Rationing of care is guaranteed under Ms. Learnard’s desired system. That is not from me, but from the President’s own lips.

In what is perhaps the coldest words ever uttered by an American president, he said, “We will not be able to make subjective decisions” about patient care.

In other words, we don’t care who you are, what your situation, we will enter the cost/benefit matrix and decide if you live or die.

As someone who has a spouse battling stage IV pancreatic cancer, I know the well-meaning “cost benefit” analysis commissars.

Those people told my wife she would not live six months nor would ever see surgery, and it was not the insurance company. It was boards of “medical experts” similar to what President Obama wants, who never see the patient.

We, however, refused to cede our liberty to decide how we would live or die to “well-meaning” others. We found doctors who agreed, and despite Ms. Learnard’s deprecation of insurance companies, our insurance company was with us and supported us in every way.

My wife has lived two years and saw the birth of her first grandchild. How do you value that?

You won’t get that in “Obama care.” He has already told us that. Indeed, at a recent conference sponsored by PanCan, the biggest fear in the room of all pancreatic cancer patients I talked to was national healthcare, for they all know where it would lead.

They would be “cost/benefited” by the government out of their very lives.

The fact is, of all the current Democrat proposals, a patient with a life-threatening disease has less appeal rights than a Gitmo detainee or a criminal on death row.

Thus we find out from the President’s own lips, that your life is not your own under “Obama care.” I’m going to repeat that: Your life will no longer be your own under government healthcare.

Silly me, I thought your life was your unalienable right, so stated by our Founders. Yet Ms. Learnard is ready to toss aside the very reason for American exceptionalism, wealth and prosperity, personal liberty.

Indeed personal liberty is the reason for American wealth that Ms. Learnard is so ready to confiscate and spend. Ms. Learnard, an obviously well-educated woman, completely omits this fact from her discourse.

It is terribly sad in this time of celebration of the Declaration of Independence [that] Ms. Learnard is so ready to dismiss its profound words.

She is ready to trade an inalienable right, a birthright given to her through the blood of our forefathers, for a promise of rationed care that has terms that can be changed at the whim of political commissars.

That is not a deal I wish to make and neither should any American, rich or poor, old or young.

Gregory B. West

Peachtree City, Ga.

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