To the Editor:
I thank Rep. Dave Yacovone for his recent commentary (“There is no quick fix to solve health care problems,” Feb. 27, 2025). Rep. Yacovone details how our ailing healthcare system is failing so badly. To quote Rep. Yacovone, “To say that the health care system is unraveling is not an exaggeration.”
We could go on until the next millennia about why. I suspect that most of us, from the governor to our Legislature and every level of the workforce, know why. Overall, however, it is the basic malady of our healthcare system: we treat healthcare as a business and patients as sources of cash flow.
We as a nation have yet to find the moral and political courage to treat it as a basic human right. Everyone knows this, but all our attempts at so-called reform have been efforts to avoid this, to keep the system the same under a new name and the profits rolling in.
If you treat healthcare as a human right, then you finance it as a human right. That means it would be universal and publicly financed, like our roads and schools, for the public good, not to benefit shareholders or as a welfare system for high-priced CEOs of the medical-industrial complex.
As Rep. Yacovone said, it would not be quick or easy in our federal-state mess, but we could fix our terrible healthcare — that is, if we really wanted to.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier