Hospitals scramble to take care of virus patients and are losing income from low-priority, high-profit elective surgery. They are also spending a lot of money fighting for ventilators and protective equipment. As their overall income declines and expenses rise rapidly, hospitals are cutting salaries of doctors, nurses and other front-line workers.
To further complicate things, if doctors talk to the media about the overwork and lack of equipment and masks, they have been fired! If you need health care, do you want to go to a hospital where the staff is overworked, underappreciated and underpaid?
To stem the economic pressure on hospitals, and not cut front-line caregivers’ salaries, I suggest all political entities (federal, state and local) temporarily cut salaries by 10% and forward that money to our hospitals. It would be great to see Congress do this immediately. Maybe our president could do this by executive order.
Earl Berkun
Trump, Fox News need to go now
The following are euphemisms describing our great leader: ignorant, pompous, fetid, blatantly incompetent, narcissistic, psychopathic, immoral, destructive, disloyal, nefarious and more.
Tied to the right wing is Fox “News,” which consistently inundates the public with contrived distortions of happenings, aiming at eliminating influences of the liberal left wing. In the process, harm to others is irrelevant. Sadly, it has been successful in convincing a large segment of our citizenry that many of its twisted “truths” are valid, effectively producing results detrimental to us.
It is vital that the above-described blights be neutralized, preferably eliminated from power for our preservation.
A. Sheldon Gelburd
Don’t disregard power of prayer in pandemic
One of my favorite scriptures is: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land.” (II Chronicles 7:14)
In two world wars and several lesser wars, our nation has called on God for help, and he has responded and delivered us.
I am so disappointed to see people take a different approach in our current global pandemic. In some letters to the editor, people have trivialized the call to prayer and mocked God by calling him an imaginary character.
One letter referred to some of our leaders as fools for calling on the nation to pray to God.
The Bible says, “the fool has said in his heart there is no God.”
The Bible also says, “God is not mocked.”
True, we must use all that science has taught us. We can have all of the scientific knowledge in the world, but we still need God first and foremost.
I have heard it said that “there are no atheists in a foxhole.”
Jack Williams
Associated Press ‘checks’ Trump
I agree with a letter writer who called Trump a liar. In just the past two weeks, I have read six “AP Fact Checks” stating that Trump made misleading and erroneous statements just on coronavirus. Sorry, but the TFP only allows 200 words. If anyone is interested in the truth and the specifics, please read the “AP Fact Checks.”
Mike Miller, Ringgold, Georgia