The Independent’s otherwise comprehensive coverage of Wellfleet’s May 20 town meeting (“Wellfleet OKs Gaza Ceasefire and Pesticide Petitions,” May 23) failed to mention the nearly unanimous vote to approve a third citizens’ petition: to have town officials convey to our legislators the support of Wellfleet voters for the Medicare for All in Massachusetts bill.
It is not surprising that town meeting voters and the select board were overwhelmingly in favor of the petition. Whenever voters learn about the advantages and cost savings of a single-payer system for universal access to health care, they support the change. Our petition outlined the savings for Wellfleet if Medicare for All were passed. Our coalition’s municipal cost survey showed that four of the towns in Rep. Sarah Peake’s district would save almost $5.5 million annually, and employees of those towns would save an additional $2.4 million.
What is surprising is that neither the Boston Globe, the Independent, nor the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing consider Medicare for All a solution to the many crises facing our health-care system. The United States is the only industrialized country that lacks a public universal system; as a result, the U.S. has the highest health costs per capita in the world with the worst health outcomes among high-income countries.
The Steward Health Care System scandal, the unavailability of primary care, the overburdened emergency room staff, and the runaway costs of health insurance and prescription drugs can all be traced to a profit-driven system with an unmanageable patchwork of payers, networks, and exclusions. Our current system promotes new technology and prescription drugs at exorbitant and rising rates, creates bureaucratic barriers to access to care, and fails to invest in public health as well as primary and family care.
According to a recent state survey, 41 percent of Mass. residents have trouble affording health care, and 31 percent forgo care, even though 97 percent of the population is insured. The Outer Cape’s seasonal and tourist economy plunges many residents into the ranks of the working poor — making too much money to qualify for MassHealth but too little to pay the high deductibles and copays of the most affordable plans. Preventable severe illnesses and deaths are the result.
It is shameful that the Medicare for All bill has been submitted in every legislative session for the past 10 years but has never made it out of committee. How many legislators receive donations from the medical-industrial complex? How many industry lobbyists have ensured that the bill is killed in committee?
Media outlets who are committed to investigative journalism could make a difference.
Bonnie Shepard, a member of the Cape Cod Coalition for Universal Health Care, lives in Wellfleet.
