Christmas Day: I am listening to a conversation with six family members, who all have children, about their experiences with our current health care system. They are all employed and dependent on company provided health care insurance and the common theme was the insane costs they have to endure just to “have health insurance.” Good, bad or otherwise.

They talked about the monthly premiums (from a low of $500 per month to over $1,000 per month), about yearly deductibles (from $3,000 to over $8,000 per year) and about co-pays (ranging from 10 to 20 percent) — all these crazy out-of-pocket expenses that these working-class families are all paying.

I was dumbfounded and had to pose a question: “What if you could have more and better health care with no out-of-pocket expenses, at all?”

If we had universal health care as proposed by Bernie Sanders, they would no longer have to pay out-of-pocket expenses for premiums, deductibles and co-pays, with the added bonus of better health care. They all started talking about what they could do for their families if they didn’t have to worry about health care and could spend that money on themselves.

Food for thought: America is the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide Universal Health Care for all its citizens. Vote Bernie.

Richard Blackstone

Creswell

Comments are closed.