Everybody is in favor of health care reform, but of the three gubernatorial candidates, only Amanda Janoo supports and advocates for publicly financed universal primary care, mental health care and substance use care as a first step toward publicly financed universal health care for all. With public financing there will be no need for health insurance companies, which provide no care and siphon critical dollars from our system.

Every other industrialized country has some form of guaranteed universal health care for all. Their health care is better and cheaper. The U.S. is an outlier. Vermont, our Brave Little State, can be a shining example of how a single-payer universal system can work.

Now is a unique opportunity to create this system in Vermont as premiums, co-pays and deductibles skyrocket and access becomes more difficult. Business, school and municipal budgets are over-burdened by health care costs.

More than 50 years of band-aids have not fixed our dysfunctional insurance-based system. Amanda Janoo will make this fundamental change happen.

At the turn of the 20th Century, when automobiles were introduced, the horse and buggy livery industry collapsed and disappeared. Let’s do the same for the health insurance industry.

Jack Mayer, MD, MPH
Middlebury