Letters
Seattle Times, Jan. 19, 2011
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke’s defense of the new health-care law had the usual fatal flaw: He still allows it to feed a callous health-insurance middleman [“Repealing new health-care law will make America less competitive,” Opinion, Jan. 15].
The law itself recognizes the immoral abuses of the health-insurance industry. It then immediately gives the industry hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year to continue to deny care and bankrupt Americans.
Meanwhile, single-payer insurance systems have been proven to cost half as much as we spend. These single-payer insurance systems also cover everyone, eliminating bankruptcies. Our own government statistics prove single-payer insurance systems are the best at controlling costs. All of Locke’s numbers pale in comparison with the $400 billion we would save each year by simply eliminating the health-insurance middleman.
Give all of this, it seems Locke is defending entrenched political donors, not a health-care law. Until we get a single-payer insurance system, we will never see an affordable health-care act.
William McQuaid
Seattle