By Jay Brock, M.D.
The (Fredericksburg, Va.) Free Lance-Star, Letters, February 17, 2021
Most Americans are fed up with skyrocketing health care costs. We pay way more than any other advanced nation—and get worse results.
Our bureaucratically bloated health insurance system manages to not only waste $600 billion health care dollars a year just in administrative costs, but also manages to leave one in four Americans with inadequate coverage or none at all. In our system, if you lose your job, you lose your insurance—so it could happen to anyone.
Each year, an estimated 68,000 Americans die because they cannot afford timely medical care. No wonder so many of us feel our health care system is just one big ripoff.
So it was refreshing to hear President Biden pledge in his inauguration speech that he would “make health care secure for all.”
The surest way to do that would be to transition to a single-payer Medicare for All, a health care system that is publicly funded, but in which care is still privately delivered. Hopefully Mr. Biden has finally abandoned the fiction that “building on the Affordable Care Act” would help. It won’t. All it would do is perpetuate a dysfunctional system that for many decades has failed to be affordable or to cover everyone.
I hope Mr. Tim Kaine and Mr. Mark Warner, our two U.S. Senators, join in the effort to ensure that finally “health care is secure for all,” and support real health insurance reform by supporting single-payer Medicare for All.