Editor,
To provide single-payer health care, we will first eliminate the profit-soaked health-insurance industry. We won’t need them; everyone will be completely insured from birth. No more having to make a choice between eating, paying your mortgage or rent, or buying your child’s medicine. No more losing your home if you get cancer. No more inches of paperwork, worry and aggravation.
If you or yours are sick or injured, you simply go to any health care provider and get it taken care of immediately, at no cost. No more premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays, no forms, no costs. Your child gets well and you keep your home.
After eliminating the private insurers’ profit taking and squeezing some of the greed out of the pharmaceutical industry, in order to give full complete medical coverage to all we will still need to raise some additional money. I think that America’s well-known billionaire, Warren Buffett, points out the solution to this much more simply than I can: “It just seems plain wrong that I should pay less taxes on my money than my secretary pays on hers.”
No need to raise taxes on anyone, other than the multi-millionaires and the corporations they own. Some of them, while taking advantage of all the benefits this society provides for them, and even getting corporate-welfare subsidies, pay no taxes at all.
And maybe we can shave a few billions from our bloated military (where $30 billion recently came up missing). The most reasonable single-payer health system, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All, will bring us up to the standard for health care found in most other industrialized countries.
Rand Cullen