JAMES HAYES

For New Yorkers, there is another option for health insurance. It’s called the New York Health Act. It will provide universal health care to all citizens of the state through a single-payer system, similar to Medicare for all (A4738, S4840). The proposal has been thoroughly analyzed, vetted and endorsed by dozens of organizations. It has passed the Assembly three times since 1992. Now is the time to adopt this world-class solution to our health care problem.

Our present system has been hijacked by insurance companies and the monopolistic pharmaceutical industry. Moving to a single-payer system could save nearly $45 billion a year. For details, see tinyurl.com/hm4v24v.

In 2008, the World Health Organization found that the U.S. spent nearly twice as much on health care as any of the other nine countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. U.S. outcomes were far worse. Our country ranked last for life expectancy, infant mortality and preventable deaths per capita.

You ask: “Why is this?” The answer is that the U.S. has the distinction of being the only one of these 10 nations without universal health care.

JAMES HAYES

CORNING