Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Like the Vineyard Gazette, I am a firm supporter of Obamacare. Much effort and thought went into developing a plan that phases in changes over several years that are intended to fix our ill-performing health care system.

Experimentation and innovation are an integral part of the phase-in plan to determine whether certain changes really work. If they don’t, they are either modified or jettisoned. In short, the plan is flexible. What we probably most need is a national health care plan — the Canadian and German plans could well serve as models — but alas that is politically out of the question. Nevertheless, Obamacare is at least a step in the right direction in my view. Unfortunately, Obamacare faces ferocious opposition from conservatives whose main objective seems to be to demean and oppose anything that Mr. Obama supports as a way of undermining his electability prospects. Let’s try our utmost to make him look bad is seemingly their goal. He’s gotta go! Because he is black? Because he is not a Republican? Because he is trying to take steps to improve the lot of middle and lower-class citizens?

Benefits from the health care debate are already being felt, which has stimulated health care providers throughout the country to innovate and experiment with reported positive results in efficiency and cost containment. I disagree with most of Mr. Robb’s political diatribe in his letter to the editor in the July 13 issue, including his statement that Obamacare would result in “less innovation and increased costs.”Also that Mitt Romney will lead us out of the Obama “depression.” Really? It seems to me that the “recession” was dumped on Mr. Obama by the previous inept administration, which has been further complicated by a worldwide recession. Oh, but isn’t it politically convenient to blame Mr. Obama for instigating this messy economic predicament.

I find it interesting that Rommey supporters and Mr. Romney himself violently oppose Obamacare when that plan is closely patterned after the health care plan Mr. Rommey put into place in Massachusetts when he was governor. This seeming contradiction appears to be nothing other than a political ploy; Mr. Romney has mastered the art form of flip-flopping.

Jettisoning Obamacare in its entirety is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. There are many features that could easily be overlooked like: no lifetime limit on coverage for 105 million Amercans; up to 17 million children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage by insurers; 6.6 million young adults up to age 26 have taken advantage of the law to obtain health insurance through their parents’ plan; free coverage for comprehensive preventive services for millions of women starting in August; 86 million Americans, including 32 million seniors in Medicare, have already received free preventive services; 5.3 million seniors have already saved $3.7 billion on their prescription drugs; since the health care law was enacted in March 2010, 4.2 million private sector jobs have been created — many of them in the health care industry; the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit has already been used by 360,000 small businesses to help insure 2 million workers; $11.1 billion in rebates from health insurance companies this summer will benefit nearly 13 million Americans.

Mr. Robb states that Obamacare will add $823 billion to the deficit by the year 2024 whereas other studies have shown that the deficit will be reduced by $124 billion over the next 10 years, and over $1 trillion over the following decade. Projections of this kind are frighteningly difficult at best as we all know from past experience. Remember the glowing projected surpluses over a ten-year period made in the year 2000, which led to lowering federal taxes, the time when the projected surpluses were burning a hole in the Republicans’ pocket, leading Tom Delay to say to the citizens, the surplus “it’s your money” as a way of supporting the tax decreases. We all know how frightfully wrong those projections were. Mr. Delay never did say whose money it was when we ran deficits.

In any case, whether we can afford Obamacare remains to be seen, but in my view the plan is a step that we can ill afford not to take. We simply must try to change and improve our health care system so that most people receive quality care at an affordable cost.

Bill Becker

Princeton, N.J.