MVA rip-off Quoting Putin Blaming others Affordable Care Act

MVA rip-off

The state Motor Vehicle Administration requires that you turn in you license plates if you sell your vehicle or it is wrecked.

Now you pay, say, $200 for your two-year tags, then you sell your car and take your tags to the MVA. You paid for these tags and have had them on your car for 13 months. You think you were going to get a refund for the 11 months that remained on those tags. You find out that the MVA will only give you a refund if the tags you turned in had 12 months or more remaining on them.

Say what? What a rip-off by this state and the MVA. I guess this is why the MVA went to two years instead of one year.

This should not be legal, but it's the state government of Maryland and it can do whatever it wants - what can we do?

RON POSTICK

Glen Burnie

Quoting Putin

There is a sign on Odenton Road in Odenton that says: "Putin says that the lame duck is a dummy."

I respect the sign owner's right to express his political views, which he does regularly with his signs. However, never in my 70 years on this Earth have I seen or heard an adversary of this country quoted to make a political statement.

Doesn't this person know that Vladimir Putin's government is described as a "managed or authoritarian democracy" and Mr. Putin is only a step away from being a dictator?

TOM MIXON

Odenton

Blaming others

The capacity of liberals to blame others for their problems instead of accepting responsibility for them is simply amazing. Regarding the Democrats saying Hillary Clinton's loss is the Russians' fault, as one of our greatest presidents in history once said: "There you go again."

The Russians subverted Hillary's campaign by hacking her and the Democratic National Committee's servers and releasing the astoundingly incriminating content that showed the depths of depravity and moral bankruptcy of Hillary, her campaign, and the DNC.

Yes, it is the Russians' fault that the content of the hacked emails showed just how despicable the Democratic leadership was. No, Democrats, Hillary's landslide loss was not the fault of whoever did the hacking, it is the fault of your corrupt, morally bankrupt leadership, which the emails exposed.

If you seek to find the real cause of your disaster, force your leadership to look into the mirror.

GLEN C. SOMES

Millersville

Affordable Care Act

Wes Moore, as quoted in the article "A call to action at Martin Luther King Day breakfast" (Maryland Gazette, Jan. 18), urged his audience to remember that King "wanted to see a 'willingness to actually do the work' necessary to enact change." That call to willingness hit a perfect note when paired with Moore's quotation from King's "I Have a Dream" on embracing the "fierce urgency of now."

Spurred by those sharp words of action, I have named the ill-considered repeal of the Affordable Care Act as a matter for the "fierce urgency of now" and have rededicated myself to work to stop its repeal. In Anne Arundel County, nearly 50 percent of our school-age children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches; that means that 50 percent of families in our county with school-age children earn less than $30,615 a year.

Where is there room in those family budgets for around $1,000 a month in health care premiums and deductibles of $1,000 to $6,000?

I shopped for individual health insurance in October. A pre-existing condition disqualified me from insurance outside the Maryland ACA marketplace. Yes, premiums in the marketplace were extraordinarily high and the deductible ridiculous, but I had health care coverage because of ACA.

Unaffordable health care will still be there if the ACA is repealed. Instead of repealing ACA, let's work to bring down the premiums. Let's not abandon 12.7 million ACA-insured Americans and nearly 18 million more people who benefit from all the other provisions included in the Affordable Care Act. Let's fix it, not ditch it.

MICHELLE LeFURGE

Arnold