Health care uncertainty

To the editor:

As a small employer, informed citizen and voter, I am extremely disappointed with the outcome of the latest health care vote. The facts are clear: The new law will raise, not lower, insurance costs and it will increase both taxes and the cost of doing business for the very people they said they wanted to help – small businesses. This is not the reform we asked for nor can afford.

Not only does health care law spend $900 billion we don’t have, but it’s paid for on the backs of small employers. It dumps disproportionate costs and mandates on small businesses and provides unfair exemptions for big corporations and labor unions.

The new health care law is filled with huge tax increases, confusing rules, complicated formulas and perverse incentives for small businesses to grow. It leaves small businesses wondering what they should be doing next. What we do know is the combination of this uncertainty and these new costs isn’t encouraging job growth during this unprecedented recession.

We need more lawmakers who understand that small businesses are vital to our economic recovery and will take the hard votes to protect the interests of small businesses. Maybe then our nation’s job creators wouldn’t have to worry so much about the agenda being pursued in Washington, D.C., and can get back to running their business and helping to get our economy on track.

Andrew and Susan Esposito
Celebration

Supports Wheeler

To the editor:

It was brought to my attention by a fellow teacher that there was an article in the Osceola News-Gazette on April 7 about Jay Wheeler’s visit to my classroom during the November Teach-In.

I have finally taken the time to read the article from your newspaper about the complaint filed by Mr. Tom Long with the Florida Ethics Commission alleging ethics violations while at Osceola High School. Most interesting is that the article claims that based on the complaint, Jay Wheeler misused his position in a classroom. It was my classroom in which he taught that lesson last November.

It makes me wonder why the journalist who wrote that article never bothered to contact me, the teacher whose class Mr. Wheeler was in when this on-campus campaigning was alleged to have happened in the complaint.

During the teach-in, when many volunteers were teaching in various classrooms at Osceola High School, Mr. Wheeler was the only person who volunteered to come into my classroom to talk to my students.

He is on campus at Osceola High School weekly, mentoring. He has visited my classroom on more than one occasion and is welcome anytime. I know that he has also visited other classrooms at OHS and has been doing so for years.

As for the specific allegations, that he was campaigning and handing out campaign material, he talked to my students on what it takes to get elected. He brought campaign material with him to show what a candidate needs to do to win an election.  When he brought out some of the campaign material he uses – a T-shirt, stickers and fingernail files – one of my students asked if he could have the shirt. Mr. Wheeler was nice enough to give it to him. Some of the students asked for the stickers and fingernail files and once again he gave them the stickers and files.

My students learned an important lesson on how to apply for a government office, what it takes to help win a campaign and how the democratic system works.

The reporter should have talked to me about what actually happened.  Mr. Wheeler has never said or done anything inappropriate in my classroom with my ninth-grade students.

Stewart Halperin
Osceola High School teacher