Stowe Today

To the Editor:

I would like to reply to Mr. Randy Brock’s column (Stowe Reporter Sept. 11), “Health Care parable: You can’t get there from here.”

Mr. Brock’s parable is interesting, but excessively incomplete. He missed many of the streets leading into the “Old Free Market.” These are streets like “Claim Denial Street,” “High Deductible Road,” or “Medical Debt Way.” Then there is “No Insurance” highway, with exit tolls such as “Your Money or Your Life,” where you keep pouring money into the basket to save your life or die. All of these roads lead into “Bankruptcy Way.”

No one likes to be on these streets; they can easily end up there in Old Free Market through means beyond their control. 



Another salient fact missing from Mr. Brock’s parable is that his stereotypical “Old Vermonter” is no doubt on Medicare, our single-payer program for the elderly.

With this in mind, perhaps the Old Vermonter might think a minute, then tell the newcomer that something different is coming to Old Free Market. This is a development which has replaced the streets of Old Free Market with streets like “Guaranteed Access Street,” “No Medical Debt Road” and “Universal Access Way.”

This is not some newfangled Vermont scheme. Every other democratic nation has closed its “Medical Debt Street” and “No Insurance Highway.

“Come to think of it,” the Old Vermonter tells the newcomers, “you can get there from here.”

Walter Carpenter
Montpelier