Our health care crisis continues. We have the most expensive, complicated, and fragmented system of health care in the world and sadly, poor health outcomes. The Affordable Care Act’s mandate forcing everyone to buy health insurance still leaves us with unaffordable health care as the health care industry responds with ever-increasing premiums, co-payments, deductibles, high drug costs, and out-of pocket-costs. Our current health care system has uncontrolled costs and is based on making a profit.
We can fix our broken health care system by expanding and improving the existing Medicare program to cover everyone. Medicare operates with a three percent overhead and does not pay huge multi-million dollar salaries to its executives. A non-profit, single-payer system, such as Medicare for All, would save billions of dollars by reducing paperwork and negotiating for low drug costs.
A single-payer system would be financed by a small payroll tax, but it would eliminate high premiums, co-payments, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses for everyone. It’s important to pay attention to the second part of this sentence.
Most people get mad when they hear about a tax increase but they don’t realize that with a non-profit health care system, like improved Medicare for All, they would no longer be burdened with high costs of healthcare. Please take the time to understand this. It’s important to realize that a national or state non-profit health care plan would save people thousands of dollars on their health care costs and they would be healthier.
Maria Termini
Jamaica Plain resident