FREMONT - Molly Fails has family members with pre-existing health conditions and she said nobody chooses to get sick or injured.

It's one reason why she supports a single-payer health care system.

"This is one way to cut the complication if a person is sick," Fails, a Fremont resident, said Tuesday before the start of a community forum dedicated to examining the possibility of a single-payer health care system.

Sandusky County Citizens for Affordable Healthcare hosted the forum, “Healthcare for All: The Path to Single Payer,” at Birchard Public Library.

Johnathan Ross, a Toledo-area doctor and past president of the national Physicians for a National Health Program, spoke about his experiences as a physician and what led him to embrace the idea of a single-payer system.

Ross, a professor at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center, said he had worked as a primary care doctor in Toledo since 1980 and started looking into the idea of a national health care system in the late 1980s.

He said hospitals and doctors spend a huge amount of time chasing money owed by insurance companies for care and treatment given to patients.

The Toledo doctor said a single-payer system would be a financially conservative solution with liberal health benefits to a crisis in access and affordability for many Americans.

"For me, it's just the simple, logical answer," Ross said.

Josie Setzler, chairperson for the Sandusky County group, said she thought there was some momentum nationally for a single-payer system, with 16 Democratic senators showing support for Sen. Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill and 119 co-signers in the House of Representatives to similar legislation by Rep. John Conyers', D-Mich.

Setzler said members of her group have grown increasingly concerned about congressional efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and roll back Medicaid expansion.

"We believe this is going to become an important issue in the upcoming campaign in 2018 and also in 2020," Setzler said.

Dennis Slotnick of Genoa, regional coordinator for Single-Payer Action Network Ohio, also spoke at the forum.

He said his group's intent was to get people the health care coverage they need in this country.

Slotnick said health care does not serve people in the United States as well as it does in other industrialized nations around the world, with Americans paying much more than what citizens of other countries pay but not getting the same returns in terms of health outcomes and benefits.

"We really ought to be doing something different with our health care system," he said.

Slotnick said he has been advocating for a single-payer system for 18 years and had not seen the general public as receptive to the idea as it is now.

dacarson@gannett.com

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Twitter: @DanielCarson7