To The Editor,
Former senatorial candidate Dick Tracy’s column (“ACA: A Lump of Coal,” 12/27) is 634 words long, and it presents an error of fact or reasoning on an average of every two sentences.
To address each within the Vermont Standard’s suggested editorial guidelines would require a letter at least four time longer than his, so I will limit myself to pointing out the misstatements and poor research: 1. He does not know the effects of a bad insurance policy. 2. He fails to understand the importance of wording in a poll. 3. He fails to provide a comparison between bad policy cancellations and future enrollment in Obamacare. 4. He uses the Obama quote out of context. 5. He relies on a year-old financial estimate. 6. He misstates the reason for the retirement of a civil servant who has served for 40 years. 7. He does not know that Congress is mandated to participate in it. 8. He believes that financial needs never change and therefore don’t need to be re-visited. 9. He believes that the only fair redistribution of income is not outward or downward, but upward. 10. He believes a right-wing think tank’s prediction that Medicare will be insolvent by 2016. 11. He does not understand the nature of a right-wing think tank. 12. He does not understand that the Medicare Part D law was crafted by Republicans with the intent of destroying Medicare.
Other than that, the grammar and punctuation are very good.
Chuck Gregory Springfield