In your 20 Aug 27 edition, a letter on healthcare reform from Roland Straten (recent Republican candidate for Congress) is full of misinformation and missing information. He states that we have a fine healthcare system, but "the high cost prevents many people from participating."
"Many?" How about 46 million! He claims that changing a few small regulations would make health care available to the many now excluded. This is nonsense.
He goes on to say that "ending the dominance of employer-sponsored plans should be a priority." To this I agree.
The question is then what? He provides no answer. In other words, let the marketplace reign, let the insurance companies continue to treat health care as a bottom-line business, not as a right to which all citizens are entitled.
He then goes on to excoriate "a single-payer plan" as "socialized medicine," hauling out this tired label meant to preclude any reasonable thinking. As it happens, we already have a single-payer system and it works fine: it’s called Medicare.
We also have public libraries ("socialized reading"?), public schools ("socialized education"?), public highways ("socialized transportation"?), tax-paid police forces ("socialized law enforcement"?), etc.
A single-payer system is the obvious answer, though the greed and fury of the insurance companies may well derail it if we, the people, do not speak out. As a health care professional myself, I am well aware how insurance companies play games, deny claims, make extra work for me and my staff, waste our time on endless phone calls to get the authorization that a person’s policy clearly entitles her or him to, etc.
It is time to break this mold. Perhaps insurance companies were a step forward in 1900…today they are an expensive and cruel dinosaur.
Published in the Montclair Times