JPMorgan Chase announced last month a collaboration with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway to form an independent health care company for their employees.

Last week, one-fifth of Texans - 5.73 million people - lived without access to basic primary care.

This disparity is avoidable and not accidental.

Only by wresting health care access away from employer-sponsored insurance - by expanding Medicaid today and building a federal single-payer tomorrow - can we create a world in which all Texans are afforded the basic dignity of health equity.

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How the Chase/Amazon/Hathaway partnership will take shape is still to be determined; my guess is an integrated HMO, like California's Kaiser Permanente, for salaried employees. This is because these mega-employers no longer want to spend the exorbitant amount of money required to insure their employees in the private market and reckon they can do a better job building and financing health care with their own internal system.

Some corporations used to have a company doctor. JPMorgan Chase wants a corporate health insurance company.

But this plan does little to help people who aren't bankers for Chase or coders for Amazon.

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One-sixth of Texans lack any insurance. Harris County has the highest uninsured rate of any metropolitan area in the country.

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What's worse, having insurance in Texas doesn't guarantee access to care. Eighteen rural hospitals have shut down over the past five years. Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature has refused to expand the Medicaid program that could have helped these hospitals keep their doors open.

Because we have delegated the provision of insurance to employers, people fortunate enough to have employer-sponsored insurance face a status quo of employer domination, in which their access to essential medical care or choice of hospitals are determined by the whims of their bosses.

If Texans aren't lucky enough to have an employer, or if their employer decides to fire them, they, their spouses and their children are cast aside and left behind.

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The consequences of this risky relationship are dire, as detailed in a heart-wrenching study published in the American Journal of Public Health last month: In 2014, medical expenses pushed 16.3 million people into poverty or near-poverty, while condemning 3.94 million of the already-poor to extreme poverty.

This is the future of American health care the Amazon/Chase/Hathaway corporate collaboration portends. Your access to service is dependent upon whether you were lucky enough to be born rich, fortunate enough to live in an urban area or skilled enough to be in demand as an employee.

Texans with employer-provided insurance may be happy now, but it wasn't so long ago when coal miners could boast a robust benefits package, too. Today's job skills can be obsolete tomorrow, and everyone deserves coverage whether or not they're useful as employees.

Otherwise the uninsured will clog the public hospitals and community health care clinics, driving up costs with expensive chronic conditions no insurance company has incentive to prevent while, paradoxically, hastening the closure of hospitals serving areas of need by drowning them in red ink.

So how can Texans ensure that we're safe in our own bodies without relying on health care controlled by CEOs and Wall Street board members?

Medicaid expansion is a necessary first step and would immediately provide Texan hospitals the federal funds they need to stay open.

A recent Health Affairs paper shows that hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid under former President Barack Obama's health care law were six times less likely to close than states that refused funding.

Beyond Medicaid, a single-payer health care finance model, such as an improved "Medicare for All," will guarantee comprehensive coverage for all Americans without co-pay or cost sharing by reallocating the money we already spend on health care to take care of everyone.By forcing federal government to bear both the costs of providing care and also the risks and costs of not providing care - those expensive patients with chronic conditions - it can finally be used as a tool to lower costs and broaden coverage.

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The simple fact is that the private insurance market is incapable of reopening hospitals in rural Texas or sending doctors into poor neighborhoods. Amazon/Chase/Hathaway has no reason to invest in the programs that keep people healthy so that they never need health care in the first place, such as affordable or free housing for nonemployees, or providing or subsidizing healthy food for people who need it. But the federal government can - and it is accountable to us at the ballot box.

Single-payer is moral. Single-payer is necessary. And single-payer is achievable. All we need to do is demand it - else we abandon ourselves to a nation of, by and for the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway.

Faust is a single-payer activist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He is also employed in the insurance industry; his opinions do not represent his employer.