I’ve read with interest the writing in the Telegram on health care: an editorial that endorsed the notion of increasing health insurance coverage for the working poor (“Our View: Increase in uninsured begs for a new approach,” Sept. 21), and a commentary comparing the economics of health care to baseball (“Commentary: With health care, we’re all free agents,” Sept. 28). Really? I don’t know anyone who has chosen to get sick or need surgery.

The commentary goes on to suggest that the more access we have to health care, the more we’ll want. And the author states that government entitlements and big insurance companies are to blame, as they both “oversee an empire of unnecessary care and fraud.”

I’d suggest that the failed U.S. health care economy can be summed up in two words – “for profit.” Every other developed country guarantees health care for 100 percent of its citizens, and every other developed country does so at a lesser price. The reason is that health care is offered either by the national government or it is so regulated that prices are tightly controlled.

Nowhere else would you see the convoluted practices that we’ve come to think of as normal, like paying more for an “out-of-network provider.” Nowhere else would you see hundreds of thousands go bankrupt or die because they can’t afford health insurance.

In the Sept. 21 editorial, the Portland Press Herald weighed in on the side of Maine accepting the Medicaid funds offered by the federal government.

I’d suggest that we should do more; that we need to follow Vermont’s lead and create a health care financing system in Maine where no one is left behind, like an improved Medicare for All system. It would certainly be more humane, more equitable and less costly than what we have now.


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