Your vote is your health care

As a pediatrician for over 40 years, I know a lot about health care.

I listen to the back and forth from politicians, and I am angry.

These are things that are just plain true:

Coronavirus is awful, painful and not going away. We need a concerted, public-health-driven response. We have hundreds of people in this country who know how to do it, but they have been mocked and silenced. Our lives have been shattered as well as our economy. Our mental health is at the breaking point. The education of our children is suffering. There have been countless unnecessary deaths and suffering borne by people all over the country. Dividing us further will not conquer this.

Herd immunity for a coronavirus is dangerous and largely impossible. There are two ways to achieve herd immunity. Without a vaccine, it would require mass infection. While some would recover from the disease, allowing the virus to spread freely would result in many, many more lives lost and so many more unintended consequences, such as increased chronic conditions.

With a vaccine, herd immunity is possible when over 70 percent of people are vaccinated with a vaccine that stops others from getting infected. Measles, mumps, polio, tetanus are those vaccines. The vaccines are required by schools and jobs around the world. The coronavirus vaccines in development are not similar vaccines. The virus is too dynamic, too adaptable and too insidious to be stamped out with such an easy solution. No question, we need one, we are desperate for it. But it is highly unlikely to be preventive, only protective. With 331 million people to vaccinate, the disease will kill thousands more while this rolls out.

We are not a healthy America. Sick people cost not only lives, but increase the cost of medical care countrywide. People with no insurance or poor access to health care get into care late, often too late. Late care is massively more expensive than early care.

But who can afford health care these days? All of us are paying more. Add up the annual premiums, deductibles and copays and the price of your prescriptions. Compare it to five to 10 years ago. Compare it to health care costs for patients around the world. If you need mental health care, good luck getting that paid for by insurance companies. Not a day goes by that I do not struggle to find mental health care for my patients. And most days, I come up short.

Getting everyone insured is in everyone’s best interest. Fix the Affordable Care Act if you don’t have a better offer. We have been waiting four years for the “replace” but only have gotten the “repeal.” How will some of you do if we only end up with the latter? Will your 21- to 26-year-old still have insurance?

Will you get free preventive care? Will you be OK, if there is a cap on annual medication out-of-pocket expense? Those days are not as far behind us as you think, nor as far away as you might wish.

Get those prescription costs down: there was progress being made, until the initiative was pulled only a week or so ago, to send seniors $200 gift cards to cover their medications. The gift card will cover one or two prescriptions, but doesn’t come close to getting prices down for everyone. EpiPens still retail for $877.94. In Canada, they cost $100 with no prescription and no insurance. Regulate medical advertising, quit catering to the pharma lobby, and take care of Americans. Let doctors do their jobs.

We need to get this pandemic under control; we need to put doctors and public health personnel in charge of the effort. Most of all, we need to stop pretending that we are doing everything right. We are not. Nothing will get better if we do not stop the bleeding: not the economy, our kids’ education, our Thanksgiving plans, our seeing our families, job security — nothing.

Our only power is our vote. For those of you who think your vote doesn’t count, you are dead wrong. With the way things are now, that could easily become literal. Your last day to register in Connecticut is Oct. 27.