Termini: Health Care for All is medicare for all

We need to change our health care system to Medicare for All. Our current health care system is in crisis and the cost of health care has been rising so rapidly that many people can’t afford it even with insurance.

Health care is a basic human need. It should be available to everyone. The United States is a rich, developed country but its health care system is broken and fragmented; we have the most complicated and expensive health care in the world.

Stories of how we don’t get the health care we need abound. My friend Melinda is a single mother and earns barely above minimum wage. She has health insurance but each time Melinda takes her daughter to a doctor, she has a co-payment of $70, which is expensive. Melinda has medical problems, but she can’t see a doctor herself because she can’t afford the co-payment. The mother of an eight-year- old boy in the Midwest couldn’t afford to take him to a dentist. This boy died because his untreated toothache grew into a brain abscess that killed him. His mother had health insurance but it didn’t cover dental health. Apparently, teeth are not considered part of our body by the insurance companies. A young woman in Nevada was denied care for a blood clot in her leg because the hospital said she didn’t have insurance even though she actually did. She died.

Over 1,600 insurance companies increase health care costs with a high overhead, mountains of paperwork, prior approvals for care, expensive advertising, and salaries of millions of dollars to their executives and billions of dollars in profit, hidden in offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Corporate greed has no place in health care. Despite the Affordable Care Act, health care costs are out of control with ever-increasing premiums, co-payments, high deductibles and out of pocket expenses. Diabetics die because they can’t afford the high cost of insulin, often close to $400 a month.

When people cannot afford needed care, they delay care or skip preventive care, needed tests or prescription drugs. They get sicker. Care delayed is care denied and many suffer and die! I have lost very dear friends because their cancer was detected too late to be treated.

Meanwhile, the health care industrial complex continues to make huge profits. The insurance companies are not our doctors but they often control our health by not paying for necessary care.

This causes pain, suffering, death and medical debt and bankruptcy when patients have to pay for life-saving care out of pocket. The insurance companies also create networks that dictate what hospitals and providers a patient can use. A woman in New York City received a heart transplant. As she was recovering, she got a bill for $60,000. Because her surgeon was not in the insurance company’s network, they wouldn’t pay for the operation that saved her life.

We need to take the profit out of our health care. Medicare for All is the solution to our health care crisis. Medicare for All is health care for all. It will create a new system of publicly-funded health care that would be affordable, cover all our medical needs and cover everyone. No one will be denied medical care or the prescriptions they need. Medicare for All will cover all health care needs, including dental, vision and reproductive health. No one will die because they can’t see a dentist to treat a toothache. Improved Medicare for All is efficient, simple, and eliminates administrative waste and eliminates corporate greed.

Canada has Medicare for

All. It is affordable and Canadians are healthier and have a longer life expectancy than us. Ask your legislators to vote for Medicare for All and make it the law of the land. It’s a matter of life and death.

Maria Termini is an artist, activist and public speaker who lives in Roslindale, MA. She has worked with Habitat for Humanity and served in the US Peace Corps in Bolivia. She works with Mass Care and Healthcare Now. She can be reached at mariatermini2013@gmail.com and welcomes your comments.