To the Editor:
America’s current obsession with efficiency is absurd when you look at American healthcare. It is the epitome of inefficiency and it accounts for more than 17% of national GDP [https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/historical]. In Vermont, our 2019 healthcare cost of $6.5 billion [https://vtdigger.org/2021/05/12/vermonters-spent-6-5-billion-on-health-care-in-2019/] accounted for roughly 18.5% of VT’s 2019 GDP of $35 billion [Table 3 at https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2020-04/qgdpstate0420.pdf] and is a major driver of ever-increasing school budgets.
There is nothing efficient about a healthcare system that pays for healthcare through hundreds of different private insurers, administering thousands of different insurance contracts, in addition to many different state and federal government programs that each have their own eligibility requirements.
Our journey to healthcare essentially involves countless trains traveling many different tracks. Passengers rarely know how much the journey will cost before they embark, or exactly when and where they will be forced to cough up some portion of the price. Nor do they know for sure what awaits them until they arrive at the destination. They nervously travel from one payment station to the next, coughing up premiums, deductibles, co-pays or the entire price if their ailment isn’t “covered” by their insurance.
All along the journey, money changes hands for the cost of the train crews, the tracks and train cars, the fuel, the train stations, the ticket sellers…. money pays for the trip, not the healthcare at the destination.
You can’t hope to make the system itself more efficient by addressing the operation of a single train, or even a single train station. We all need to ride the same train, at the same price, to the same healthcare destination. Yes, that means single payer.
Lee Russ
Bennington