The Affordable Care Act has been flawed from its very beginning, when it turned over its administration to private insurers. Since then, and more so now, the nation has witnessed a decline in its “affordability” as the immensely profitable health care industry complains that it can’t make enough profit on the policies assigned to it under the ACA.
Aetna, with a profit margin of more than 20 percent, is now threatening to pull out of the ACA, leaving many persons high and dry or with little, if any, choice of carriers.
A single-payer system of health care financing (Medicare, for example) for all can cover everybody with an overhead of 2 to 3 percent. This nation is wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on private insurance companies whose profits go to CEO salaries ranging from $8 million to $66 million (plus stocks), and who need to keep their stockholders happy. Those companies also need to advertise and lobby congresspeople.
Bernie Sanders has it right, as does the rest of the industrialized world. Health insurance is not a partisan issue — it is a matter of human right.
The public needs to support single-payer health care insurance.
John Sytsma, Farmington
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