Letter: Congress is simply out of touch with reality

Thursday, March 8, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

As the horrific problems with the military care at Walter Reed Hospital are finally being exposed (by The Washington Post), I see our congressmen are falling all over themselves in front of the cameras to demand action.

Perhaps if our members of Congress were forced to use the Veterans Affairs system for their medical care, this problem would not have happened.

Perhaps if the members of Congress, especially the Armed Services Committees, were to spend a month embedded with our servicemen overseas instead of their two-day "fact finding (also known as public relations) trips" once every couple of years, they might actually be able to speak with some authority on our troops and the war.

And, perhaps, if members of Congress had Social Security as their retirement plan instead of their gold-plated pensions, Social Security would not be in jeopardy.

Perhaps if our members of Congress were to spend a month living in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans instead of their multimillion-dollar estates in the Hamptons, the Katrina mess would be behind us.

Perhaps, rather than their automatic pay raises they have put into law, if congressional pay raises were based on how much money they saved the government rather than spent on wasteful pork barrel projects, there would be more money for increasing the minimum wage to a survivable level. Perhaps if our congressmen would actually take an individual stand on an issue instead of appointing a committee to hide behind, the American public might actually have some respect for our members of Congress.

J.J. Schrader, Henderson