Lawrence Miller wrote a community forum (Addison Independent, June 30) on the costs of the U.S. wasteful system of health care, which ranks as the most expensive in most nations and way down in providing good health. This is well documented.
One thing I do not find in his article is just how much U.S. versions of single payer, like that proposed for Vermont, will cost.
Will it cost way less than half of what we now pay, like the better care available in Canada? Will it cost around half of ours as that in many countries of Europe, which also supply better care?
Many don’t believe that there are better and cheaper health care systems but those need to do their homework. Any Canadian politician would lose an election if he wanted to harm their system.
Meanwhile, what are the costs for the new Vermont system projected to be? Will they be as good as Canada, or have the highly paid lobbyists paid to have lots of goodies in these new systems to protect entrenched interests and make the new system about as expensive as the debacle we now have and not even health quality is improved?
Maybe the cost numbers have been released but I don’t remember seeing them.
Can someone who knows tell us what these cost projections are, in real understandable numbers?
And then we can discuss how to bring up quality to be more like much of the rest of the developed world.
Peter Grant
Bristol