Affordable Health Care for All, Cradle to Grave

            I am a “consumer” of health care with a Medicare Advantage plan. I would much rather be a “patient” like I was in the late 1950s when I birthed my 3 babies in a 4-day stay for each at a local hospital. With insurance then from a nonprofit Blue-cross, Blue-shield, we—a working class, one-income family—did not worry about how to pay for health care with birthing or when our son suffered a kidney disease at 4 years old and required treatment for 4 years through several lengthy hospital stays.
            Then profit and advertising entered the system and created the Health Care Industrial Complex. Since then the quality, accessibility, and affordability have become increasingly cruel and unsustainable for the vast majority of consumers. I am a mother, grandmother, and neighbor of working consumers who must decide with health-care needs to seek care or pay for housing or heating because they can't afford the co-pays and deductibles of insurance or have no insurance at all.
            There is a solution to this unsustainable situation in Maine. The Maine Center for Economic Policy conducted “a study of the costs and economic impacts of a health care model that would cover all Maine residents through a state-level public plan, with no fee at point of service.The results of the study show that total yearly healthcare spending could decrease by $1.5 billion under a new public plan, delivering significant benefits to Maine residents, cities, towns, and employers, along with fiscal stability for healthcare providers and hospitals."
            There are 4  bills currently in the legislature to create such a model for Maine. I believe the best of these is LD 1611. Health insurers and other big-money stakeholders of the health-care industrial complex are lobbying our legislators hard and contributing big money to political campaigns. The only voice in the legislature more powerful than these stakeholders is the voice of voters. I will write my Senator and Representative and urge them to support LD 1611.  And I will be voting in the next election for candidates who pledge support for a single-payer universal health care plan.

A version of this post appeared as a Letter to the Editor in The Star Herald 1-15-2020