By Bill Semple, L.C.S.W.
The Daily Camera (Boulder, Co.), Letters, July 21, 2018
How do we live with the fundamental reality that we are all in this together while tending to our responsibilities to ourselves and our loved ones? We see this come to the fore when figuring out how we best pay for our health care.
Hearing individual responsibility and valuing the private marketplace in recent decades has led us to depend on for-profit insurance. Unfortunately we are distinctly vulnerable, when it comes to health care, to being taken advantage of. Experiencing it’s our money or our life, we’ll pay whatever.
And we do. The insurance, pharmaceutical and big-hospital corporations have us paying twice as much per person for poorer health outcomes compared to other countries that have universal ways to pay for health care. We’re being ripped off.
The profit motive will not protect us in our vulnerable, undeniable need for health care. The profit motive drives avoiding the older, sicker, poorer, high deductibles, narrow provider networks, medically driven bankruptcies, and uncoordinated care ā sound familiar?
We hunger for a way to pay for health care that is of, by, and for the people. As Medicare works for our seniors, it can be improved and work for us all. Paying our premiums through taxes, not through profits, will protect us from the predation we now experience.
Publicly funded, privately delivered health care is responsible. Privately funded health care makes us unprotected by handing our control and hard-earned dollars over to the pockets of the few.
Time to vote is coming again. Ask your candidates if they support improved Medicare for all, or if they can say who should be bankrupted getting the care they need.