The path to affordable, equitable, universal health care is not mysterious.  If we need models, we can look to any of the nations of the developed world, and many in the developing world as well.  Many nations have been working with single payer systems for fifty or more years, so we have plenty of evidence that single payer health care systems work, and work a great deal better than our so-called system does. 

Every single payer system delivers health care more efficiently than ours does—the least efficient single payer system spends, on average, thirteen cents of every health care dollar on administration, while the average insurance company in the U.S. spends between twenty-five and thirty cents of every dollar on administration.  Furthermore, most developed nations and several developing ones score better than the U.S. on many major indices of health. 

We don’t need to study this issue further.  Here in Vermont, we have already tried more “moderate” options, only to find them prohibitively expensive and still grossly inequitable.  Embarrassingly large numbers of Vermonters remain uninsured, or, like me, underinsured.  I earn more than the median income in the state, yet all I can afford to buy as a self-employed person is a policy with a $5000 deductible.  We call this a system?

For years, we’ve been told that single payer is “too radical,” despite the fact that we already have a single payer system for senior citizens (a.k.a. Medicare), and despite the fact that polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans support extending such benefits to all.  Support for single payer continues to burgeon—calls for this “radical” reform are now coming from big businesses, physicians’ groups, and organized labor as well as more traditional advocates.  In fact, it begins to look like the only people for whom single payer is still “too radical” are insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their elected lackeys. 

The current economic crisis is proof of the trouble that results when supposedly representative government attends to the interests of the corporate elite at the expense of the majority.  It is clear to me, and I suspect to many other Vermonters, that we can’t afford that kind of government anymore. 

Please do the right thing for the people of Vermont and work vigorously for single payer health care this year.