By: Melinda Moulton, CEO/Redeveloper of Main Street Landing & Single Payer Supporter
Testimony provided to Health and Welfare committees, Jan. 12, 2010
For over 26 years Main Street Landing has provided 100% Health Coverage for our employees and their families at no expense to them. Main Street Landing pays 23% of our payroll toward health insurance for our employees and their families. Why – because we believe that health care is a human right. That said, we are finding it increasingly difficult to provide this benefit because of the escalating costs of insurance premiums.
According to the Business Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare:
“For the same amount of dollars we are paying to cover 85% of the population poorly, we could cover everybody with a first-class system. Yes – Medicare is more costly today because it covers only the people the for-profit industry doesn’t want; seniors and end-of-lifers. But fold in the younger generations, and the average cost is actually less.”
Winston Churchill once said, “America will always do the right thing, but only after failing at everything else.” Haven’t we failed our citizens? Haven’t we bankrupted families – burdened businesses – ignored and punished the disenfranchised all while lining the pockets of the insurance and health industries?
Just ask any business in Vermont “Can you afford to provide quality health insurance for all your employees”? Most will give you a resounding “No!” I believe if you get sick you should get care and that single payer should write the check.
How do we pay for it? We eliminate the wasteful costs of health care – the insurance companies marketing costs, broker commissions, huge executive salaries, administrative overhead and high costs of lobbying and campaign contributions – these costs that are added to the rates then reimbursed by unsuspecting consumers.
I know Vermont can institute a cost-effective, and much better quality health care system. As a business person – my bottom line says this is about Human Decency and when you care for the people and they thrive – then business and the economy are the direct beneficiaries.
If more business people spoke on this issue as clearly and strongly as Melinda Moulton, Vermont might be closer to creating a publicly funded healthcare system. Doug Racine, chair of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, described a meeting last week on jobs and the VT economy where business people complained about high taxes and an unfriendly business environment, but not healthcare. For whatever reason, legislators are not hearing enough statements like Melinda Moulton’s, and are all too aware that while a publicly funded healthcare system would relieve businesses of responsibility for their employees’ healthcare, and reduce healthcare spending for the governments, businesses, and people of the state, it would do so by replacing premiums with increased taxes. The apparent perception by some business people that this would do more harm than good would seem to remain one of the obstacles to be overcome. Thanks Melinda.
Health care is not a privilege. Nor is it a right. It is a need. A fundamental human need.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”
Powerful words from our Founders. Words that have been forgotten. Words that have been dismissed.
Government is not the grantor of rights. It is its securer. Its protector. As so eloquently outlined by Thomas Jefferson.
In one of America’s bloodiest events, some 600,000 Americans gave their lives in securing these rights.
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves,” so said Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln understood our nation’s strength emanated from our freedoms; from these “unalienable Rights.”
Unalienable Rights cannot be transferred or forfeited to anyone or any one Government, for they are “endowed by our Creator,” the natural result of our humanity. A right conferred by government to one person is simultaneously a right denied to another.
Preservation of freedom balanced against this fundamental human need of health care is the task. A task not unlike that found in Vermont’s 1778 motto of “Freedom and Unity.”
Government single-payer health care is anathema to the freedoms found in both our nation’s Constitution and its Declaration of Independence.
Competition through interstate commerce, tort reform and amending the tax-favored employer-based system would spur the necessary innovation and balance the needs of a free society with that of meeting this most fundamental of human needs.
Dear Tom,
You said, “Government single-payer health care is anathema to the freedoms found in both our nation’s Constitution and its Declaration of Independence.” This may be self-evident to you, but it is not to me. Please explain what you mean. As children we learn that the U.S. Constitution is “interpreted,” that there is a Supreme Court whose work it is to re-examine the decisions of other government decision-makers in light of it’s own interpretation of the Constitution. Still, the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court disagree with each other fairly often. What we do with government is to attempt to make and keep agreements. How would you support your claim, that “Government single-payer health care is anathema to the freedoms found in both our nation’s Constitution and its Declaration of Independence?” I ask you so that I may better understand your point of view, because I recognize that we are all in this together. I am not being ironic or flip, but sincere when I ask you: How would you explain it to a twelve-year old?