Gov. Scott has proposed healthcare changes, including allowing insurers to take age into account in setting premium. He says “None of these ideas are radical … we know they work, because we’ve seen how these practical reforms have helped other states expand affordable choices, strengthen their insurance markets, and reduce costs.”
On that basis, universal healthcare is even further from radical. We know it works, because we can see how that practical idea has helped every other industrial country reduce costs while ensuring healthcare for all of its people. It is our very patchwork and convoluted commercial system for providing healthcare in America that is “radical.” Tinkering with some details of that radical system does not change its radical nature.
A major reason we differ from other countries is that we have such organized and well funded resistance to universal care. Take the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future: Unknown to the vast majority of Americans and almost never mentioned in the media, this combination of American hospital, health insurance and pharmaceutical interests was formed to “change the conversation around Medicare for All” and “minimize the potential for this option in healthcare from becoming part of a national political party’s platform.”
The Partnership represents those who profit from America’s radical approach to healthcare. They do not represent the vast majority of us who suffer the consequences of that radical approach and who provide the very funds used to ensure our healthcare future remains dismal.
Lee Russ
Bennington