Seventeen years ago in 2007 the American, and Vermont’s, healthcare imbroglio compelled me to make an awful decision. I had to bargain with a hospital for how much I was willing to pay to save my life. I was ransoming myself. I was uninsured and needed a certain operation to stay alive. I knew the operation. I had three of them before that, but had been employed with health insurance. I lost my job and, with it, the insurance. Then the disease returned and I had to decide between years, possibly decades, of heavy medical debt or just let the disease kill me.
I thought of this when I read Mr. Emerson Lynn’s editorial “That 22.8% hike in health care premiums is only the beginning “(Messenger, August 16, 2024). That headline is correct. Mr. Lynn quotes Owen Foster, chair of the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB), as saying about these dismal rate hikes “While these rates are plainly unacceptable, the alternative of an insolvent insurer unable to pay for patient care was worse.”
Why is the alternative of an insolvent insurer unable to pay for patient care “worse?” What befell me in 2007 was because of our insurance system. This or something similar confronts a great many Vermonters every day. Think about that. Think of all the claim denials and the prior authorizations the insurance system forces upon us. I almost died because of them.
The suffering that this system inflicts on us, and the moral and political cowardice of our leadership (in general and not specifically) that forces it on us, is probably incalculable. So why not let the insurance companies become insolvent? Why do we need them to do what we could easily do ourselves with a publicly financed arrangement at excessively less cost that could cover all Vermonters?
Why do we waste so much of our healthcare dollars subsidizing interminable layers of administrations and excessively high CEO salaries while even those with insurance have to resort to Gofundme campaigns? Maybe an insolvent insurer would be the best thing for us. It would finally spur us to do what we should have done with Act 48 to reform our system so that it serves us Vermonters and not the bottom lines of big business.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier, Vermont