[Platform] Fwd: letter to editor on health care

[Merelice]

Cool letter!
Merelice


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nat Fortune <nat.fortune at comcast.net>
Date: Mar 21, 2008 10:34 AM
Subject: letter to editor on health care
To: "M.K. Merelice" <merelice at gmail.com>
Cc: Eli Beckerman <elibeck at gmail.com>



Here is a copy of the letter to the editor Jill and I just sent to the
(Greenfield) Recorder about the collapsing Massachusetts Health
Insurance Plan, which just announced 12% increases, plus increases in
co-pays and deductibles

Nat Fortune

 [250 words]

To the Editors:

Given the recent brouhaha over Senator Barack Obama's unattributed use
of a speech by Governor Patrick, we were surprised to hear the
Green-Rainbow party's criticism of the Massachusetts Health Insurance
Plan being lifted by the Governor himself!

In our June 4th, 2006 op-ed in the Recorder, we wrote that the
Massachusetts mandate to buy private health insurance was "like
declaring an end to homelessness by requiring everyone to rent an
apartment without heat and hot water." Two years later, Governor
Patrick has come to the same conclusion, declaring that without cost
controls, requiring everyone to buy health insurance makes no more
sense than trying to "cure homelessness by ordering everybody to buy a
house."

We admit it. The Governor is a better wordsmith. But in his change of
words, he also pointed out another truth: in two short years,  health
insurance that used to cost about the same as an unfurnished apartment
now costs as much as a predatory mortgage!

We now ask the Governor to steal the rest of our proposal.  Adopt the
only proven solution to our health-insurance problems:  the privately
provided, publicly financed health-care system known as single payer.
This system is already in place in countries from Germany to Japan. We
deserve no less.

One party now controls the Massachusetts House, Senate, and the
Governorship. We are living in a Democratic nirvana. So why do we
still not have single-payer health care? And by the way, why haven't
we cured homelessness?

Nat Fortune, Whately, and co-chair, Green-Rainbow Party
Dr. Jill Stein, Lexington