Letter to the Daily Herald: Medicare for All

Support move to universal health care

That's because we have an enormous parasite on the U.S. health care system: The health insurance industry. Health insurance companies gobble up about 31 cents of every health care dollar. They contribute not one aspirin and not one Band-Aid to anyone's medical care. They collect premiums and they control who gets care and who does not. I hold them directly responsible for those 18,000 deaths.

They justify their existence on the bogus claim that they provide "choice" to consumers. In reality, employers choose the health plans for most working Americans. And the self-employed, who buy health care on the open market, find that the plans we choose often reject us because of our pre-existing conditions. Plans sometimes deprive us of the choice that really matters: the choice of doctors.

Administrative overhead for a typical HMO is 15 to 25 percent. Administrative overhead for Medicare is 3 percent. Far from being efficient, private medical insurance constitutes a huge, expensive, unaccountable bureaucracy that stands between us and our doctors.

The solution is to create an American health care system that eliminates the health insurance companies. It would work like an upgraded Medicare for everyone. HR 676 in the U.S. House of Representatives does just that. In Illinois we have a similar bill, HB 311, which would create such a system here in our state.

Glad to seem the parasite meme is taking hold.

Letters to the Editor are one of the most popular sections of a newspaper, they are an excellent way to get the word out. They also have the happy effect of "working the refs." Have you written a letter to the editor in support of Medicare for All?