Readers write

Health care insurance is an economic necessity

Calling health care a market choice ignores reality — especially here in Georgia. Illness is not optional, suffering is not negotiable and survival should not be treated as a consumer luxury.

When someone is facing a serious diagnosis, they are not comparison-shopping — they are trying to stay alive. Policies that weaken protections for people with chronic or high-risk medical conditions do not encourage responsibility. They punish people for circumstances they did not choose.

In many Georgia communities, particularly rural areas with limited providers, families that are already coping with fear and uncertainty should not also have to weigh treatment against affordability or travel distance. As costs rise and access narrows, working families — not the wealthiest — are the ones carrying the burden.

Georgia’s health care policy should reflect the lived experience of ordinary people in our state and be grounded in fairness, reality and basic human decency.

CINDY MITCHELL, JACKSON

Suburban voters don’t want MARTA

Should elected leaders follow the will of the people or try to repeatedly change the will of the people? You wouldn’t know the answer from reading “Will suburban voters ever support transit expansion?” (AJC, Jan. 2).

Time after time, voters’ answer to metro Atlanta transit expansion has been “no.” Leaders, please take “no” for an answer and move on to other solutions.

DANA R. HERMANSON, MARIETTA

No history rewrites of Jan. 6

Five years ago this week, President Donald Trump’s followers attacked the Capitol and threatened the lives of U.S. representatives and senators. Even Vice President Mike Pence.

The rioters were beckoned by Trump specifically for Jan. 6, not Jan. 5 or 7. They attacked police, they injured police and they ravaged the building and the offices of elected officials. If not for heroic evacuations, the outcome would’ve been deadly. Trump’s allies claimed their destruction was patriotic.

Unfortunately for them, the indisputable evidence of their actions was captured on film. The painful screams, the thuds of flags hitting police bodies, the chants to hang Pence. We saw it, we heard it.

No one should claim it didn’t happen or downplay the insurrection. They try. But history won’t listen to their feeble, propagandized rewrites of that day.

In years past, the truth was written by those in power, possessing a pen or a sword. Now history is written instantly in a cellphone video. George Floyd’s truth would’ve been covered up were it not for a bystander recording the murder.

Jan. 6 is archived in our brains and our data storage. Trump might pardon those who criminally committed his wishes, but historians will simply say, “Roll tape!”