Editor:

This is a thank-you letter for your Health and Wellness Issue (Jan. 22). I am especially grateful to hear about what "Obamacare" funding is doing to help our outrageous homeless problems in the county, and also what the larger picture of access to insurance and doctors is looking like in Humboldt County since the Affordable Care Act. Without these two articles, I wouldn't know that an actual, more widely funded and available safety net is beginning to be constructed (however imperfect it will be in the short and long term) to connect homeless people into actual sleeping places, as well as needed social services to help bring them toward mental and physical health, and into the care they deserve as human beings.

I also wouldn't know that the California insurance commissioner and our congressman were going to bat for us with the insurance companies that have (guess what) shafted us again. Here's to some great reporting, aimed at informing North Coast residents of the wide angle view of our current reality.

Amanda Malachesky, Petrolia