Readers Write: U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis on health care vote, for-profit HMOs, Gov. Dayton and the Legislature, environment protection and the Chamber of Commerce, college prep grants

Jon Tevlin's May 7 column on my support for the American Health Care Act ("Spare us crowing over your 'health' bill") was both inaccurate and offensive. Put aside the numerous non sequiturs in the piece regarding what is or is not political courage, the deliberate distortion of actual fact cannot go unchallenged and is not fit for a newspaper with any interest in maintaining a modicum of credibility.

Now, I understand how quoting people who are genuinely scared and vulnerable might make good copy for a columnist with an agenda, but using those remarks to give a deliberately false impression is not good journalism, to say the least.

For example, stating the AHCA turns back the clock so "insurers could consider sexual assaults and even pregnancy pre-existing conditions" is an outrage and deserves a retraction. Gender discrimination is explicitly prohibited by the law and exploiting the tragedy of rape by falsely referring to it as a pre-existing condition is unconscionable. So much so that the Washington Post gave the scurrilous charge a well-deserved "4 Pinocchios" from the paper's fact-checkers. The Star Tribune should do the same.

Under the AHCA, no one can be charged more for any reason unless they stop paying their premiums. Tevlin's suggestion that this continuous coverage requirement is "robbing people of coverage" is especially partisan given that it's nearly identical to the provision in Sen. Ted Kennedy's 1996 HIPAA law for employer-sponsored plans — no doubt like the Star Tribune's.

Tell me, Jon, was the late liberal lion from Massachusetts "cynical" and "mean-spirited" as well?

The writer represents Minnesota's Second Congressional District.

An example of why for-profit health insurance would not work ("Minnesota is poised to fall into a trap," May 10): I have lived with, and worked despite, a serious autoimmune disease for almost 20 years, which has been stubbornly hard to treat. I have tried many medications that either worked and then failed, or never worked at all. When the latest med stopped working, I went to Mayo, to see if my specialist there had another ace in her pocket. And she did; she recommended that I join her research trial this summer. Ahead of the trial, we need to treat a related condition, for which she recommended a safe, noninvasive procedure. It's somewhat experimental for this condition, but she thinks it will work. However, my insurance company flat-out refuses to pay for it, against the recommendations of my doctors, against specialists who have been treating me, and this disease for years. It's prohibitive to pay out-of-pocket.

Insurers, how much do you spend on executive salaries? How much on advertising? How much on lobbying? How many health care dollars are you diverting from actual health care? How are you adding value, coming between patients and their doctors? At best, you are an expensive bill-payer. At worst, you sentence people like me to a diminished life, marked by pain and fatigue. We need to get rid of these money-sucking middlemen called insurance companies. We need real nonprofit health care. We need Medicare for all.

Gov. Mark Dayton says "I will veto every one of those bills" (May 10).

Seems like the governor refuses to live with the results of the last election.

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Try as I might, I cannot think of any reason why House Speaker Kurt Daudt and his caucus continually do this. It seems to be such a waste of time, energy and taxpayer money. It certainly must take a personal toll on them as well. They push forward with their social policies that the majority of people in Minnesota do not support, such as restrictions on abortions. They know the governor will not support this, and they know it in advance. After they fail to make progress in discussions, they retreat to the Capitol and begin passing these measures into laws, which they know will never become laws. The Republicans hold a very slim majority in the Senate so the bills may not pass there, but even if they do, the governor will veto them and they will not become law. They know this.

Meanwhile, we need light-rail funding, which they have stalled; the University of Minnesota has not received proper funding; statewide education and prekindergarten seem unresolved, and roads and bridges statewide are in poor shape.

Speaker Daudt, please. Stop with the show. Just move the important business through.

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce response on May 7 to the May 5 commentary by Peter Gove and Ron Sternal would have us believe that Minnesota still leads the nation on the environment. The fact is we once had that distinction but sadly no more.

We have slipped from where we were in the 1960s and '70s beginning with the Republican action in 1986 weakening the citizen policymaking board of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and calling polluters "customers."

The 2015 session of the Legislature did away with the citizen board, which was the brilliant creation of a conservative state senator, Gordon Rosenmeier, 50 years ago this spring.

Where was the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce on the environmental battles since then? It was against the strong measures we enacted in the '70s despite the support those laws had from Republican legislators like Robert Dunn, Wayne Popham, William Kirchner and others. When I worked at the MPCA, I had to fight the Minnesota Association of Commerce and Industry (MACI), as the Chamber was then known, on many issues.

The Chamber reveals its real role when it says it seeks to "facilitate a changing and growing economy." Over the past many years, it has not shown equal attention to strong environmental measures that are essential to a healthy economy.

The writer was executive director of the MPCA from 1971 to 1975.

The May 11 article "College prep grants for poor rejected over clerical errors" was provocatively misleading. As a former grant writer and grant director for both federal and state grants, I can tell you that the strict formatting is designed to create a process that facilitates a fair and objective peer review. An institution that cannot follow the instructions to correctly complete an application would very likely be challenged complying with the grant requirements. For these discretionary government grants — including Upward Bound — the expectation is that the applicants who rise to the top of the review process have the capacity to be good stewards of these public dollars.