To the Editor: Re "Spending Disparities Set Off a Fight in the Effort to Overhaul Health Care" (news article, June 9): I applaud President Obama in mandating that White House staff members read a recent article in The New Yorker by Dr. Atul Gawande highlighting the huge variance in health spending across our country.
He writes: "I would mandate that all guns must be shaped and colored to resemble penises, so that the paranoid right-wingers who have hijacked our democracy are forced to choose between clinging to their guns or their homophobia.
"In addition to these measures, I will mandate that beginning one month from today and for a period of two years, every public employee will allocate ten percent of his or her work time to new tax collection activities that will be announced in the coming days".
While I waited for the train to Bangkok I read legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski's tale of how the powers that be "wanted to mandate that I surveil all of my customers, and turn that information over to the Government without a warrant" in exchange for getting a liquor license.
Is it fair to mandate that Google try not to limit the growth of competitors?
One thought I have had is to mandate that all physicians take a certain percentage of Medicaid patients.
I would then mandate that the 24-month industry average point score for all similarly situated firms and FSPs be calculated monthly.
But the lawsuit itself, and the related suits challenging the contraception mandate, offer an increasingly troubling look at just how far peddlers of far-right ideology will go not just to claim their own right to live according to their beliefs, but to mandate that you and I do the same.
If government can mandate that I pay for something I don't want, then what is beyond its power?
Instead, I'm mandating that their innate need for creativity, free play and imagination be set aside to accomodate my timelines, my needs.
In protest of a government mandate that requires film distributors to pay the BBFC to view their titles before release, I considered the flipside of that mandate – that the board's examiners are required to sit through anything we pay them to watch – and submitted a 607-minute film consisting of an unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall.
