Editor's Note: These featured comments are the most thoughtful or eloquently stated comments from our Facebook page and crestviewbulletin.com and do not necessarily reflect the newspaper management's views.

•••

Much debate on social media still centers on the Confederate battle flag fluttering on East First Avenue in Crestview. Here are some of our readers' comments:

Represent heritage, lose hate

… Apparently, folks in your community are feeling the need to drive through town with battle flags on their trucks and yell racial slurs out the window at people.

Y'all ain't right.

… Rep the heritage and lose the hate. If it's about heritage (and it is for me) divorce yourself from racists. Condemn them.

Loree Arrington

•••

Flag is a history lesson

It's part of history, people. If we don't learn from our past, we can't change the future.

Pushing it away, hiding from it, sticking your head in the sand and pretending it never happened does not make it go away. That's how all the rumors get started in the first place.

If people don't know the truth about history, then we are doomed to repeat it.

Teach the next generation about where it came from, why it was created, and why we moved on will accomplish more than if we hide it and create drama and strife between races.

Dawn Bayles Wamsley

•••

Flag resurrection 'a step backward'

A step backward and loss for the South again as we continue to honor a Confederate soldier with a questionable past (facts that justified the memorial), who fought for the state's right to continue to keep African Americans enslaved.

So sad, and the very same reason why there are still many deep-rooted African American haters in the Southern states.

If the rest of the world can acknowledge that maybe it's time to right the wrongs of the Civil War and Confederate soldiers, why can't you?

LaDonte McQueen

Flag represents failure

The confederacy lost. The confederate flag is essentially the "championship" T-shirts that go overseas.

William Echevarria

•••

Confederacy and Nazi parallels

It's just a flag right? By that logic, if Germans wanted to celebrate their heritage, you should be okay with it; otherwise, that's hypocritical, no? The parallels are uncanny.

Cody Lawler 

•••

Which issue is more important?

Just out of curiosity, what is more important to the people of Crestview: flying this flag or lowering property taxes?

If you had to choose council members based on those two issues, would you pick council members who are likely to increase property taxes and support flying the (Confederate battle flag) or those council members who are likely to take down the CBF and vote to lower property taxes?

John Q. Baker

•••

Changing topics…

The (tentative) millage rate went up! Anyone catch that part? Fort Walton beach has a SWAT team of their own but yet (the Crestview Police Department) sent the … SWAT team and SWAT trucks out to Fort Walton Beach to handle a call with one shooter in his house.

Why, since our town is so broke and the CPD equipment is so old, are we sending all equipment 30 minutes away?

Kyle Able

•••

Let's disagree without labeling

Opposing opinions seem to be too easily blamed on racism and hatred. In this day and time, we ought to be able to disagree on issues and not automatically (be) deemed a racist.

Shirl Griffin Long

•••

Readers who learned about two Crestview teenagers charged with a rash of burglaries, and children staying out all night raised these concerns.

No morals

Morals in this country have gone away. People feel entitled to things that aren't theirs and for some reason feel they have a right to take them.

Lisa Hare Nivison

•••

Does Crestview have a curfew?

"Nothing good happens after midnight" was the rule for my teenagers. I can't imagine young children out that late without adult supervision. Does Crestview have a curfew?

Barbara Gordon

•••

Street walking is 'awful'

I live down Stillwell (Boulevard) and there (are) two teenage girls that walk the street between midnight and 4 a.m. on a regular basis. They can't be any older than 14 or 15. It's awful.

Vickie Smith

Join the conversation on our Facebook page>>

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: HUBBUB: Which issue is more important, does Crestview have a curfew?

Editor's Note: This column was inspired by this recent column>>

Perhaps the question should be, “Who benefits from racism in 2015?”

•President Obama. Any criticism of his policies is met with cries of racism.

Criticize Obamacare; you are racist. Criticize illegal immigration; you are racist. Criticize the Iran deal; you are racist. 

His election — twice — was supposed to prove that America is post-racial. But he uses race to divide Americans; that’s how community organizers organize — by pitting one group against another. 

From what I see, race relations are worse today than at any time since the late 1960s, early '70s.

•Al Sharpton. He used the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray to raise funds for his National Action Network. (Maybe he will use that money to pay his tax bill?) He is quick to call racism before the facts are in and even after the facts prove otherwise. Google Tawana Brawley.

•Planned Parenthood. It's founded by Hillary Clinton’s hero, Margaret Sanger, who felt that blacks should be exterminated like weeds. 

Planned Parenthood aborts more than 1,700 black babies each day, about half the daily 3,300 abortions performed in the U.S. Yet blacks make up only 12.2 percent of the population.

A recent report shows that the number of black babies aborted in New York City exceeds the number of black babies born there.

Sanger would be proud.

•The Democratic Party and Big Government.  The party that, right up until President Lyndon Johnson figured out how to get “those (redacted) to vote Democrat for the next 200 years," was the party that opposed civil rights for blacks. 

Johnson’s Great Society has done in 50 years what hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination could not — destroy the black family. 

In the 1950s, only one in four black children lived in single-parent homes. Today, that number is three out of four. 

The anti-poverty programs that came out of Johnson's Great Society have not reduced poverty (14 percent in 1965 vs. 14.5 percent in 2014), but they have increased black dependency on government; they are in virtual chains on the government plantation.

•The New Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. Leaders of both groups have called on blacks to kill whites — “every last cracker.”

Oh, wait, which black congressman said “cracker” was a term of endearment? I forget.

•The NAACP. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People does some admirable work addressing racial issues like the case of the children who have been racially harassed in the local schools. 

But they also stir up racial strife where none exists.

They want to eradicate every vestige of Confederate history from American life (a stated goal of the NAACP). Like removing the Confederate battle flag from memorials to Confederate soldiers, like trying to have a portrait of Robert E. Lee removed from Lee County, Fla., property, like digging up the dead? 

Do you really think that this promotes unity and racial healing?

Or is it more likely to swell the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan?

•And the Klan, of course. They have to be loving the current atmosphere. They got to face off in Charleston, S.C., recently against black protestors on TV and the internet.

They are back out of the shadows and even out of the sheets.

The increase in racial tension following the events starting with Ferguson, Mo. last year just fuels their flames.

Don’t encourage them.

Dale Robinson is the Crestview News Bulletin's circulation manager.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: ROBINSON: Who is racist in 2015? Seriously — you have to ask?

Healthcare remains at the center of debate in Florida’s Capitol.

But while many people focus on the number of Floridians covered by some form of health insurance, equal attention should be paid to factors driving the costs of delivering healthcare.

These costs affect the insured, the uninsured, employers and the state.

If costs are reduced, healthcare becomes more accessible to all Floridians. We must therefore look at spending on the front end and develop an effective mechanism to contain costs while considering any state options for extending coverage to more people.

Currently in Florida, fear of medical litigation among physicians has manifested itself in the practice of defensive medicine. This means ordering unnecessary medical tests, procedures, medications and consultations — with little clinical or therapeutic value — to help physicians protect themselves from malpractice litigation.

The practice of defensive medicine costs Floridians more than $40 billion per year.The billions of dollars Florida loses each year due to unnecessary healthcare expenses is a hidden driver in the cost of healthcare, and, according to the Gallup Organization, accounts for as much as 26 percent of overall healthcare spending. 

The dysfunctional, inefficient medical malpractice system is imposing an avoidable, onerous burden on a wide swath of Florida’s economy, affecting Florida’s physicians, patients and businesses.

A proposal called the Patients’ Compensation System is intended to transform the broken medical malpractice system in Florida and preserve the physician-patient relationship.

In essence, the proposal would remove medical malpractice from the inefficient court system and place it in a streamlined administrative system.

Rather than flooding courts with lawsuits that take years to resolve, the administrative model allows for a fair, less contentious and timely determination of any compensation that should be paid to an injured patient.

During a House Health and Human Services Committee meeting, Chair Jason Broduer (R-Sanford) revealed an improved version of the proposal.

He identified the legislation as a priority of his committee for the 2016 Legislative Session and a part of the solution to address the issue of escalating healthcare costs.

The newly designed Patients’ Compensation System — which responds to the valuable feedback from Florida’s physicians and other stakeholders — has these three key fundamental changes:

•It applies exclusively to physicians, as physicians are uniquely forced to practice defensive medicine.

•It significantly decreases the cost of medical malpractice coverage because physicians will no longer need to purchase professional liability insurance. Under the new proposal, an administrative fee will be determined based on the specialty practice of Florida physicians — with the fee being significantly lower than current medical malpractice rates.

•It will not increase reporting to the National Practitioner Database and Boards of Medicine.

Affordability extends to everyone across the healthcare spectrum — whether using private or public health insurance.

The Patients Compensation System would make Florida a national model for how to protect the physician-patient relationship while bringing down healthcare spending. 

The new and improved Patients’ Compensation System will be filed in the 2016 Legislative Session and will be under review by Florida’s legislators.

Wayne W. Oliver is the executive director of Patient for Fair Compensation.

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: OLIVER: Here's a proposal to address healthcare affordability