If anyone was really still lacking for evidence that Massachusetts should adopt single-payer health insurance, they need only read the Feb. 6 Gazette article “Spike in health insurance costs looms,” in which Amherst Town Manager Paul Bockelman explains why Amherst may have to make cuts in the town, school and library budgets: The town’s insurer is increasing what it charges by 20% to avoid “losing money on their contract with the town.”

While the insurer in Amherst’s situation is a nonprofit organization, the calculus here is familiar to any employer, employee, private individual, or family who currently gets health insurance from a private insurance company and is seeing the costs for that insurance increase at a rate divorced from reality — increases driven by the insurer’s “need” to maintain a profit margin. This, of course, is less about “need” and more about “greed.”

Generating more and more corporate wealth is plainly an absurd reason for insurance costs to rise, especially when 41% of Massachusetts families struggle to pay for health care. Corporations should not be allowed to exploit people who are trying to get the care they need and deserve. Corporate profits have nothing to do with quality and equality of care — the two should be completely decoupled.

The Massachusetts Medicare for All Act would save us and our communities money by creating a statewide single-payer public health insurance program. This would be paid for with a progressive tax, but it would eliminate premiums, deductibles, coinsurance, and other forms of out-of-pocket expenses devised by insurance companies exclusively for the purpose of shifting more and more health care costs off their bottom lines. For 90% of Massachusetts residents, the tax to support the single-payer system would be far less than what we are now paying on these insurance industry gimmicks.

In 2006, Massachusetts led the nation by adopting the Health Care Reform Law that required all state residents have health insurance, and set up the subsidized Commonwealth Care program for those who can’t afford for-profit health insurance. This became the model for the national Affordable Care Act, which 50 million Americans now depend on and which has, since its enactment in 2009, saved Americans over $3.6 trillion.

Massachusetts can again be the nation’s leader in making sure that everyone gets the health care to which they have an inherent right. Visit masscare.org to get the facts about single-payer health insurance for Massachusetts and then tell your state senator to support SD 2341 and your state representative to support HD 1228, the Massachusetts Medicare for All Act.

Remind them that the question of adopting single-payer health insurance in Massachusetts has been a nonbinding ballot question 68 times since 1998 and it has always passed in every district, with a statewide average approval rating of 67.5%.

Year after year, the people have made their will on this quite clear, and it is unacceptable that we’ve had to wait over a quarter-century for our Legislature to act on it. It’s time we put need before greed and create a health insurance system that works for every person in Massachusetts, regardless of their income level.

Matteo Pangallo lives in Shutesbury.