There is nothing flawed about Ms. Ignagni’s prediction! But, isn’t that one of the basic reasons we need health care reform? The implication was, we cannot afford decent health care for everyone.

A very high percentage of the workforce are employed by the retail industry that depends upon cheap labor with little if any fringe benefits. The retail industry provides no real growth in GNP. They provide no new wealth by value added processing or manufacturing.

The retail industry is certainly needed to facilitate distribution and access to merchandise needed in our culture. There is nothing wrong or immoral about their needing a profit in providing those services. However, the trend to large national corporations, that are more inclined to look at stockholder demands and upper level management greed rather than their employees needs and the needs of the local communities, has created a sizable subculture in society.

That subculture is gradually growing larger and larger and we, as a nation, are regressing toward a third world status. The upper middle class and the wealthy are becoming more distanced from the servant class. Who am I identifying as the servant class? The unskilled masses of people who fill the ranks of retail clerks, waitresses and waiters, data entry office workers, common laborers, etc. are being ignored as if they were slave chattel. Those masses of people are essentially considered as expendable resources. They need only the bare minimum of life’s necessities — just enough to keep the slots filled with bodies to perform the tasks that provide needed services for their masters, at minimum cost.

Those of us who consider ourselves middle class and self sufficient want to think we can progress upward. But the trend of our economy and the corporate nature of the business world is working against us. The small, family oriented and owned, businesses are being displaced by faceless national and international corporate structures. Family farms, those farms owned and operated by individual families or partnerships between immediate family members, are disappearing just like all the other small businesses.

We need tax reform and business regulation reform as well as Health Care Reform. When we get over the idea that society in general can prosper on the crumbs that fall off the table of the wealthy (trickle down theory), we will begin to see that survival of the fittest is opposed to equality and freedom for all.