Today's letters: Readers comment on Trump's draft order and hospital reimbursements for COVID-19

Draft order nonsense

I just listened to one of my favorite former prosecutors, Glen Kirschner, reveal to the public the draft order that Trump had prepared around Dec. 16, 2020, authorizing his new Secretary of Defense to seize and take control of all voting machines used in our country in the election on Nov. 3, 2020.

Kirschner says this order was absolute nonsense, and had been equated by other scholars as similar to the scribbling of a 4-year-old on a wall with crayons. The purpose of this order was to detect massive alleged voter irregularities, of which there was no more probable cause than the man in the moon to believe that. Mind you, Trump had just fired his Secretary of Defense and replaced him with this new stooge to do this bidding. Mind you, Attorney General Bill Barr, who had been Trump's stooge for a couple of years, got finally fed up and resigned just two days before this draft, and he had said the election was legitimate, Biden had won.

Now, the draft order was never executed, thank goodness, but if the Supreme Court had not allowed these hundreds of pages to be released to the Jan. 6 commission from the national archives, we would never have known about it. We would never have known about these seven states that submitted false elector slates. Yes, there was a steal attempt in the 2020 election, and it was perpetrated by the orange criminal and his cronies.

We had better hope that the Attorney General is looking into all of this criminality. If Trump succeeds on Jan. 6, 2020, he will have driven a stake through the very heart of our democratic republic. We should be ashamed of ourselves! Take the big private money out of politics, and we will get our country back.

Michael Perham, Clermont

Rethinking hospital reimbursements

Admittedly, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic it seemed reasonable to have employed a “cookie cutter” approach to reimbursements and subsidies to hospitals given the unexpected waves of patients that stretched hospitals and their existing infection-avoidance protocols to their limits. Accommodating these numbers was no doubt cost-heavy for all hospitals treating COVID-19.

But, two years later, is it reasonable to shift course from a one-size-fits-all reimbursement to a different one based on a “report card' system, examining the medical treatment of patients against costs and patient outcomes? After all, there are several websites consumers consult regularly to learn about the rating of hospitals across a variety of parameters when choosing their own care. The source of income for the current reimbursements and subsidies is the U.S. taxpayer with no system of reward nor lack thereof, dependent upon patient outcomes resulting in return to health versus death, respectively. Prior to the pandemic, insurance companies (including government-sponsored Medicare and Medicaid) and patient co-pays were footing the bills for hospital treatments and stays.

Are there any current measures in the pipeline that will stem the tide of this continual flow of taxpayer dollars to hospitals? If not, why not? Now that a variety of treatments exist, and the dominant variant is less severe, hospitals should be paid dependent upon better outcomes. It is plausible that the change in leadership in 2021 may have preempted what seems to be a necessary re-evaluation of the current policy.

Let's not allow this current situation to go unchecked any longer. Outcome accountability is key to preserving unwarranted depletion of taxpayer dollars. Ronald Reagan warned us decades ago that “government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”

Kathleen McLean, The Villages

This article originally appeared on Daily Commercial: Feb. 6 letters: Readers comment on Trump and hospital reimbursements