Analyzing American public health care data from the past two decades, two things stand out: Americans are not only living shorter lives, they are paying much more for this regression. The effects of our poor first-line health care defenses along with new disease vectors such as COVID-19 are eating away at our lives.
For instance, it has become difficult to get even the needed testing done which can identify and head off incipient chronic conditions. Knowing what we know about the cost-cutting focus of the new administration, this situation is not going to improve.
It seems easy for us to identify individual political leaders making our national health care decisions, but in fact it is a small number of large corporations that largely drive the decisions being made — all with little public input. Campaign contributions and closed-door lobbying from health-plan insurance companies, Medicare Advantage corporations, drug companies, and other related corporations direct our leaders toward increased co-pays and cost-cutting at the expense of our health. This is indeed an unhealthy form of corruption.
There is little chance for change at the federal level, as we see virtually no discussion there directed toward reducing corporate influence and the profit-making privatization of our medical care. But it does not have to be this way! And we do not even have to waste our time and resources assigning “responsibility” for our sorry situation. Instead of seeking “responsibility,” what we need are fixes. And it turns out that the fix is well within our power.
We have seen movement looking to such a fix being made right here in Massachusetts! In our state, the Mass-Care organization was able to put the idea of Massachusetts Medicare For All on the 2024 ballot in 11 districts as a nonbinding public policy question [https://masscare.org/ballot-question-2024], with an average “yes” vote of 64%!
Whether or not you believe that “single payer” in Massachusetts is the answer to our health care crisis, about 64% of us in these districts are interested in exploring a version of this vision at the political level. We desperately need to enter into this conversation. The more we know about a single-payer solution to the failures of our health care system, the more likely we are to see a fix.
Thomas Grzybowski
Montgomery