Letters to the editor May 6

Lawmaker should apply
engineer’s code of ethics
On April 22, The Dominion Post reported on a conversation with David McKinley, a professional engineer (PE) and our representative to Congress. He mentioned a speech in Morgantown to “an engineering group … about using engineering principles to solve problems” in energy and health care.
On a positive note, I’m pleased  he spoke to a group apparently unregulated by his party; many citizens and engineers have tried unsuccessfully for two years to discuss these issues with him. However, it is unclear who the audience was, and where he spoke; I saw no flyers in the WVU Engineering Complex.
The article indicates that Rep. McKinley is oblivious to the engineering approach for energy or health care. In energy, he believes that the only solution to our problems is the status quo, with a few tweaks.
He believes that the Green New Deal is not worth considering because it would cause us to fall behind the rest of the world, and it does not solve the problem immediately.
This foreboding sounds similar to GOP arguments over the last century. Recently, health-care plans would lead to ‘death panels.’  In the 1970s, mandating catalytic converters to clean the air would put U.S. automakers out of business. Further back, Medicare and Medicaid were socialized medicine, and Social Security was communism.
In health care,  McKinley’s solution to high costs is to throw even more money at “favored” diseases. In the rest of the civilized world, high costs are countered by negotiating prices with manufacturers and/or allowing competition.
How are his approaches “finding out what’s the core problem,” as he is quoted as saying?
I’m aware that a PE’s Code of Ethics applies only to engineering responsibilities. But McKinley would do well to apply the code’s principles to his actions as our elected representative.
Dady Dadyburjor
Morgantown