Thanks for “Ways and Means: Legislation, STAT!” [September 3]. This focused on how health care legislation not being the main show in the building last year allowed the House and Senate health care committees to quietly get through several bills to hopefully lower our crazy-high health care costs — things like reference-based pricing, the cap on hospital outpatient prescription drug prices and more regulatory authority for the Green Mountain Care Board.
These excellent bills will no doubt slow down the blackmail of our atrocious costs. I applaud both committees and their chairs for the rare courage of standing up to the seemingly omnipotent power of the hospitals and insurance companies to get their way like they usually do, courtesy of these atrocious fees and rates they charge us.
Yet we should remember that these bills do not address the most basic and fundamental flaws of our perverted health care nonsystem. That Rep. Alyssa Black (D-Essex), chair of the House Health Care Committee, is “bracing to go without health insurance next year … because of high monthly premiums” is because we have consigned our health care, and thus our lives, to the inhumanity of profit and monopoly power.
Someday, I would love to see that same courage displayed once again to do what we’ve perennially tried to avoid doing to favor the industry: a publicly financed health care system that covers all Vermonters.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier