To the editor:
Right now Congressional Republicans are dismantling Obamacare, either piecemeal or in total, because it is not affordable. “Thinking Americans” already know that no matter what they come up with in its place is also going to be unaffordable. The reasons are numerous, but I’ll just give you two.
Insurance companies. Every insurance I know of is set up to tell customers all they’ll be entitled to under their “generous” plans. Then, as soon as you’re their customer and need them to cover an operation or procedure, they are set up to deny that coverage. Everyone knows this fact. It’s been well documented. Insurance companies pay “headhunters” in their companies to “just say no” to coverage. Period.
Secondly, it’s private hospitals who set their own prices. Get a heart procedure, say, in Hospital A and they charge $75,000; Hospital B – $125,000, and Hospital C – $200,000. We need uniformity across the board. Congress has to take profiteering out of health care where every procedure has one price in every hospital. We as individual patients have absolutely no power over this. Zip. Zulch. But the government could easily regulate it.
We need universal health care. It is not just a right as Americans, it is a right of all humans. Several countries are way ahead of America on this one. Decent health care should not just be a right for those who can afford it. It should be everyone’s right and we should not have to buy insurance to get that right. A right is a right, and you should not have to pay extortion to get it. Not to mention what’s been said before: insurance companies are set up to say “no” to customers.
When we put in universal health care it takes the profit motive away from hospitals. Every patient will be treated equally, and they will only be receiving a procedure or test when they need one. There will not be the revolving doctor’s visits and repetitive tests given to people who don’t need them simply because they’re in the system. Thinking in particular here of the fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.
The best thing with universal health care is that, when you are ill, you won’t have to fight with the insurance companies to cover what they said they would cover because there would be no more health insurance companies. While recovering from your illness, you couldn’t be receiving inflated hospital and lab bills with no explanations. This alone is well worth going to universal health care.
I, personally, make just over poverty level income and I cannot afford going to the doctor’s office more than twice a year due to the horrendous costs for blood lab work. One visit with blood lab work is more than $800. None of it paid for by said insurance companies because their deductibles are so high they make sure they don’t have to pay at all. And isn’t it peculiar that insurance companies have taken to informing their customers of all these things you need to have done — things they don’t pay one red cent for because they set the deductibles so high. What a racket!
Universal health care is what we need. It’s what we as humans deserve. Period. Accept no substitute!
Clair Kierstead
Presque Isle
