If Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and, indeed, the rest of this Congress had put more effort into single-payer health care as they did in the Affordable Care Act, our growing segment of the increasingly older population, and the future of health and medical science and services for us all would have been better served.In its stead, we watched helplessly as they plowed $12.5 billion dollars into “Obamacare” which is nothing less than a Cheshire-grinning wide mouthed gift of massive proportions to the insurance industries. And now, he wants to push through another $30 billion into expanding it yet more.
This senator and all the others who supported and sold the ACA to Americans really didn’t do us any favors. They fostered upon us all an ugly monster of complex rules that in the long run will surely work in favor of the insurance industries and all of the self-serving corporate and political pundits they keep in their fat, deep pockets (The same is true for the misery behind Medicare).
Jean Hopkins, president of the Champlain Valley chapter of the League of Women Voters, writes in a letter to the editor [“League of Women Voters supports single payer health care in Vermont,” Letters, Sept. 3]: that with universal health care (single-payer) there will be:
“1. No need to determine the best balance of deductibles versus premiums versus co-pays.
“2. No need to submit personal financial data for a complicated algorithm to use in determining eligibility for subsidy and how much that subsidy will be.
“3. No need to update that information when your circumstances change, or to go through the eligibility determination again. Everybody in, nobody out.”
And, our senator wants to run for president? What for? Where are the Jean Hopkins who would serve us better and do so with less baggage than Bernie in his present incarnation?
Vidda Crochetta
Brattleboro
Also published in:
Rutland Herald
http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20140917/OPINION02/709179917/1256
The Burlington Free Press
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/opinion/my-turn/2014/09/29/obamacare-feeds-insurance-industry/16284177/
The Weekly Commons
http://www.commonsnews.org/site/assets/PDF/COMM-0277.pdf
