More than 440 workers at the MBTA make more than $100,000 a year, and other workers receive generous salaries and retirement benefits that we can’t afford.

Of course, that is the exception; the average salary is closer to $58,000 a year. But the average state salary is $10,000 less and only $40,702 for Greyhound, a private bus company. Also, MBTA workers get above-average salary and retirement benefits.

I am not in favor of spending another dime on the MBTA that has little or no benefit for most people the 12th Hampden District and western Massachusetts in general. It is time to either privatize the whole operation or go in and do some serious renegotiation at contract time to bring down wages and benefits to a level that the citizens can afford.

In this time of high unemployment, there would be no shortage of people who would love to have a job on the MBTA that offered reasonable pay and benefits.

A radical change in how health care is paid will be the establishment of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that will receive a fixed amount of money to cover all health care costs. The more services that are provided, the less money they’ll make, so the incentive will be to cut the quality of care.

In other words, these ACOs will force physicians and hospitals to deny service and strip away any remaining choice that a citizen may have in their health care. People will still be able to select their health care provider, but not what services they receive.

Naturally, the lawyer-dominated General Court failed to include any type of tort reform in the bill, so while hospitals and doctors will be forced to cut services, lawyers will be quick to sue them in malpractice cases if every possible test wasn’t made.

The strain will force many doctors to leave the state or never set up practice here in the first place. The result may be fewer doctors treating more patients with worse health care. It may even force patients to seek services in other states.

One answer is to renegotiate teacher contracts to permit longer work days, school years, and merit-based pay raises. The new teacher evaluation system that is going into place is a good first step toward the last.

We need to have a school system that reflects conditions in the 21st century that recognizes that young people no longer have to have the summers off to work on the farm and teacher salaries are high enough to justify working hours similar to private sector jobs.

Another answer is a voucher-based system. When a school continues to fail to provide a good education, parents should have the right to send their children to another school, private or public, that is performing well in another district if need be. A voucher that reflects the true cost of educating a student would be a great way for a student to move to a better school.

Ironically, some of the worse performing school systems, like Springfield, spend more per pupil then the state average, $14,635 vs. $13,361 average. If parents could be given a voucher for that amount they could send their children to a private, parochial, or another public school district.

The potential loss of income would be a great incentive for the schools to do a better and more innovative job. For example, they could start up a Virtual School or try new approaches like a single-sex school.

What has to be guaranteed, however, is that the workers are licensed in their trade by the state and are US citizens. Too many construction companies have cut costs by hiring illegal aliens and that should not be allowed.

The time has come to abolish the pension system altogether as most private companies have and the federal government did way back in 1984. Workers should pay into a 401(k)-type investment system with contributions by the governmental agency on a match basis.

I know there will be cries of "broken promises", but the solution is the one the Feds implemented nearly 30 years ago. Anyone who is vested in the current pension system gets to stay in it, and anyone who is not and new hires go into the new 401(k)-style system. The government can pay into the new system any money that would have gone toward their pensions for workers who are not vested.

My opponent ran on a promise to voters to oppose gay marriage legislation when he was first elected, but no sooner when he went to Boston switched his position and voted when the party leadership went to him.

I believe that a person should clearly state her positions on issues and only change them once elected based upon careful research and facts that may not have been available before the election, but never upon pressure from leadership of either party.