Medicare for all.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I don’t like paying my monthly premium either, but let’s not equate it with quality.
We currently have a nationwide issue with hospital staffing that leads to understandable frustration and grousing.
I’ll be first to admit that the U.S. health system is one of the most expensive in the world and has lots of issues such as insurance hassles, Medicare/Medicaid fraud, wait times and provider switching, but it has been shown that, even so, our quality is much higher than countries like Canada and most of the European countries who have a single payer system.
One success between the expensive U.S. system and the single payer system is in Singapore, where they spend only 4.7 percent of their GDP to provide universal healthcare for its citizens, compared to the 18 percent that the U.S. spends on health care.
The kicker?
Everyone pays into a health savings account.
You pay for your own care.
That’s the way it is; someone always pays.
Medicare for all?
It’s the taxpayers; not the government.
And since the poor and rich contribute very little to the tax base, it’s the people in the middle who would shoulder the burden and pay for everyone.
A person walks up to you on the street and asks you to pay their medical bill.
Absurd, right?
Yet, that is what Medicare for all advocates are really asking.
There is no free lunch.
Martin Williams
Port Angeles
