It feels like every time I open this newspaper, another town is trying to bridge an enormous budget gap driven by the never-ending rise in health insurance costs. Programs cut, class sizes up, staff lost — and the solutions are always the same small moves that barely make a dent. Watching the way we celebrated Northampton’s $50,000 DESE grant for our schools broke my heart. That we treat such a drop in the bucket as a win tells you everything about how far we have fallen. Our school funding is not a challenge to be managed — it is a rapidly unfolding tragedy.
As someone who was in the room when the Massachusetts Health Connector was created and who uses a Connector plan for my own family, I have seen this from both sides. I believed in the public-private partnership model, and yet today our family’s premium exceeds our mortgage, and the coverage gets worse annually while the price tag explodes. The private market has failed us. The public-private compromise has failed us. And the cost of that structural failure is being paid by our kids, our schools, and for some towns, their first responders.
We led health care overhaul once and we can do it again. Give us true single-payer health care. Take this impossible burden off our towns, our employers, our schools, and our families. Stop asking kids to absorb the cost of a broken system while we celebrate our crumbs.
Christopher Lucas
Northampton