Last week’s report to the Legislature on financing a single-payer health care system demonstrates once again that a single-payer system will provide comprehensive health care to all Vermonters at a lower cost. These are the two most important benefits of a single-payer system, universal coverage and manageable costs. According to the report, in the first three years alone, Vermont will save more than $280 million while providing every Vermonter with comprehensive, quality health care.
Our current for-profit system has never been able to do this because competing, multiple, for-profit insurance companies siphon off much of our money while performing no medically relevant function in the delivery of health care from providers to patients. As medically irrelevant middlemen, they waste huge sums of our money on their profits and bureaucracy, money that should go directly to our health care. With single-payer, we, the patients, not insurance companies, will be in charge. Health care will finally be universal and affordable.
FRANK NICOSIA
Middlebury