Ron Jones, a Vestal resident and former Johnson City trustee, is Broome County Coordinator for Single Payer New York. This essay appeared today in the Stargazette.com. He talks about many of the same issues that we have written about here and stresses the importance of a Single-payer health care system.

Health care is not a commodity to be bought and sold. It is a human right.

OK, everybody got that?  A human right.  It’s not so hard to understand, but we continue to have commenters who argue that point on a regular basis.

Our current for-profit health care system is destroying our financial well-being as well as lives. Twenty-two thousand Americans die every year for lack of access to health care. According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 48 million Americans not covered by Medicare or Medicaid have no coverage at all, and another 15 million are underinsured. According to a Kaiser/ABC News survey in 2006, more than 60 percent of personal bankruptcies can be attributed to health care expenses.

Go ahead, try to rationalize that.  Any of that.  People are dying and people are loosing everything in bankruptcy all because of greed at the top of  the for-profit insurance companies and Big Pharma.  Greed, greed, greed.  Pure and simple.  Stlo7 is right.  Government was established in this country, in part, to provide for the general welfare.  Single-payer falls under this auspice.

But there is a sensible alternative: the single-payer system. Spelled out in House Bill H.R. 676, it eliminates the need for traditional health insurance. All medical services are paid for by one agency instead of private insurers.

Eliminates the need for traditional health insurance.

Yeah.

(July 30th.  Bus to DC.  Be there, or be square.)

Related posts:

1. LTE Elmira Star-Gazette
2. Single-payer, Single-payer, Single-payer
3. Idiotic anti-Massa letter in the Elmira Star-Gazette
4. more letters to the Elmira Star-Gazette
5. Congratulations, Elmira Star-Gazette!