Right time to take up health care reform (BFP)

I would like to respond to the Burlington Free Press editorial "Premature to take up health care in Vermont" in the Dec. 20 edition. The editorial said "that the push to reform the state’s health care system is misguided and premature given the uncertainty of reform efforts in Washington that could upend anything Vermont tries to do on its own."

This is wrong-headed. The Senate health reform bill seems little more than yet another offering to the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies who paid so much to have things tilted their way. Supposedly, in exchange for this prodigious gift, they are outlawed from their practice of rationing care to only the healthy. Yet, there is no guarantee that this will actually happen.

What better time than now for Vermont’s "knack for creative policymaking," which has done so much good in the past. The health abyss is at the core of our budget woes. The endlessly rising premiums are breaking the backs of family, municipal and state budgets. Catamount, though laudatory, is just feeding our unsustainable system even more; despite it thousands of Vermonters still cannot get insurance. And many studies have shown that a single-payer system would, while insuring every one of our citizens, actually save the state budget millions of dollars.

As a survivor of our health denial system I applaud the Legislature for taking on health care overhaul this session. They are correct to do so; they are morally right. As Martin Luther King Jr. said "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."

WALTER CARPENTER
Montpelier