EDITORIAL

BY ART CULLEN

We received notice recently that our Wellmark health insurance for The Storm Lake Times will increase 24% this year, as it did last year. That puts us in the hole to start the year by about $40,000. It confronts us with difficult questions about what to do. We really don’t know.

We know what to say: We need Medicare for All.

Our health care system is broken. It is bankrupting households and businesses, it is delaying or denying patient care, and it is a maddening process for everyone involved.

There is nothing to recommend the current system. It is more expensive — twice so — than any other developed nation. Insulin prices in the United States are 10 times what they are in Canada. The only beneficiaries are the insurers, drug companies, and in some cases the health care providers. The patients are the losers.

Three Democratic candidates embrace single-payer health insurance that solves this problem: John Delaney, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Delaney has the best approach: He would combine Medicare and Medicaid and use revenue directed at Obamacare to offer free public health insurance to anyone — with no premiums, deductibles or co-pays. Delaney would not eliminate private insurance, as the Sanders proposal (which Warren supported) does.

This is not radical socialism. Richard Nixon supported universal health coverage. People from England and Canada we have met, liberal or conservative, can’t believe how inefficient and costly our system is.

Other candidates, such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, support essentially a public option — a government-offered insurance package that would compete in the insurance marketplace. Recall that there were supposed to be insurance cooperatives under the Affordable Care Act. Republicans in Congress refused to fund them, and hence Co-Opportunity Iowa failed. The same thing will happen with Congress when the private insurance industry attacks a weakly constructed public option. These plans will charge premiums, deductibles and co-pays — unlike the plans supported by Delaney, Sanders and Warren.

Sanders and Warren finance their plans with taxes. Sanders said in Storm Lake on Sunday that a family with an income of $60,000 would pay $1,400 per year in health care taxes. That’s what some individuals pay per month under our current plans.

Other candidates at the urging of their paymasters have misrepresented costs and benefits of universal health care and the plans on the table. The insurance companies have been relentless in pressing Congress to wipe out the meager protections offered to patients under the Affordable Care Act. President Trump is trying to undo the entire program at the US Supreme Court. He might be successful.

The truth is that health care costs are a runaway freight train. Delaney, Sanders and Warren propose to bring it under control with Medicare for All. The market doesn’t work when there is effectively one comprehensive health insurance provider in Iowa.

The principal reason we endorsed Warren is her support for universal coverage. We like Delaney and Sanders for the same reason. Caucus for Warren. If you can’t for whatever reason, give Delaney or Sanders one more look.

We can’t stand this fatal robbery any longer.

Health insurance has become one of the biggest expenses any business or household face. It is wreaking havoc for us, and that is multiplied across the country. The people who want to prevent Medicare for All are raping us and the system, and certainly don’t want it to end. In the meantime, we do hope you will urge a neighbor to subscribe to The Storm Lake Times for local journalism. It will take a lot of neighbors to cover that $40,000. Vote for Medicare for All.