April 26 – To the Editor:

Once again, the Republican leadership is preparing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. As someone who gets my insurance through the ACA, also known as Obamacare, I am dismayed by the recklessness of their plan because I will lose my health insurance. But I also understand that the ACA was not a perfect solution because it didn’t go far enough.

My husband and I are self-employed in construction and signed up for the ACA marketplace in 2013. We are responsible people and always had insurance, but the plans available to us before ACA had very high deductibles and terrible coverage. My husband is still paying for a one night hospital stay in 2012. We received a subsidy the first two years, but as our income went up, thanks to the economic recovery, we now pay full price. We are not free-loaders.

It is true that health insurance premiums have gone up. Asked to play fair and insure people with preexisting conditions, and to require that companies cover essential things like pregnancy and drug addictions, insurance companies continued to jack up their premiums. The ACA did not go far enough in putting health care before insurance company profits though it made a start.

We are the only developed country on earth that does not have universal health care. What is essentially wrong with our system is we have working age Americans paying premiums to private insurance companies for most of their lives though few of us get catastrophically sick or injured. And when we do, we discover in the fine print of our policies, that we are still burdened with enormous costs. 60 percent of all bankruptcies in America result from ordinary people with a health care crisis even when they have been paying for insurance their entire working lives.

When we are seniors, private insurance companies don’t cover us anymore because it is no longer profitable, and the government is expected to pick up the tab. Private insurers reap all of the profit and share almost none of the burden of caring for the people who need it the most. It should be one pool. I have come to believe that the only system that will work is a single payer.

It makes no sense that our health care is tied to our employment. Our system puts a huge burden on businesses, especially small ones. American companies have to compete with foreign companies that do not have to pay for healthcare. Our system stifles innovation and discourages companies from hiring older workers or anyone that might increase their insurance costs. Private insurance adds huge cost and no value to our health care and saddles every provider with huge administration costs because they have to pay people to spend all day just dealing with insurance companies.

Single payer is not government take-over of health care. It is freedom from the Insurance Company Take-over that we’ve suffered under for decades. Medicare for All does not mean free. We already pay Medicare premiums in our pay checks. Working adults would pay a little more. But we’d also NOT have to pay health insurance premiums so our savings will be huge. Want to bring jobs back to the US? Transition to single-payer. It’s time for real change. It is possible and it is necessary.

Jessica LaMontagne

Dover