Kevin Collins
Normal, Ill
The Pantagraph
Letter to the Editor
The recent letter from Gary Christiansen (“Give no free rides for retired employees,” April 23) and the response from Elma Voorheis (“Retired employees paid for their benefits,” April 30) clearly demonstrate a fundamental problem in our health-care system.
Rising costs, increased lifespan, and population and economic shifts have placed a larger burden of health-care costs on to users of the system.
As much as I sympathize with Ms. Voorheis, it is a simple fact that the money set aside for health care will not be sufficient to pay the total cost – whether you worked for the government or the private sector. Everybody is going to need to pay more money into the system to pay the bills.
Retired private sector employees are facing rising deductibles, higher co-pays and, in some cases, are losing their health-care benefit altogether. They, too, paid into their benefit packages for, in many cases, well over 20 years.
Mr. Christiansen is merely pointing out that it would be unfair to subsidize retired government workers at the expense of everybody else when everybody is facing the same problem.
The solution to this problem is a single-payer national health insurance plan.
Access to comprehensive health care is a human right. Pursuits of corporate profit and personal fortune have no place in care-giving and create enormous waste.
The United States already spends enough to provide comprehensive health care to all Americans with no increase in total costs.
However, to achieve this, the vast health-care resources now squandered on bureaucracy, profits, marketing and useless or even harmful medical interventions must be shifted to needed care, and would be under a single-payer system.