Time for single-payer

The health care proposals - or fixes, or whatever you want to call them – on the table have little to do with health care, its quality or cost; note that the most oft-repeated words in news coverage are “insurance,” “coverage”, “uninsured,” “deductible,” “pre-existing condition,” “subsidy,” “exchange,” “market” and the like.

The House Republican bill, the existing Affordable Care Act and very likely the Senate bill, which has yet to emerge, share a systemic flaw: they expect and try to require that for-profit business structures, corporate insurance companies, behave like non-profits or social agencies. Not gonna happen.

Columnists and politicians and letter writers wail and lament that the corporations are only about the money. Of course they are! A corporation’s fiduciary fealty is owed to its shareholders. It may be morally obligated to those it serves, but when did morality last beat out the dollar?

Almost nowhere in the conversation has there been mention of a single-payer system to get people well and keep people well. It’s time.

Judith Horton

Coeur d’Alene