BRATTLEBORO — If Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and, indeed, the rest of this Congress had put more effort into single-payer health care as they did in the Affordable Care Act, our growing segment of the increasingly older population and the future of health and medical science and services for us all would have been better served.
In its stead, we watched helplessly as they plowed $12.5 billion into “Obamacare,” which is nothing less than a Cheshire-cat-grinning, wide-mouthed gift of massive proportions to the insurance industries. And now, Sanders wants to push through another $30 billion into expanding it yet more.
This senator and all the others who supported and sold the ACA to Americans really didn't do us any favors. They foisted upon us all an ugly monster of complex rules that in the long run will surely work in favor of the insurance industries and all of the self-serving corporate and political pundits they keep in their fat, deep pockets (The same is true for the misery behind Medicare.)
Jean Hopkins, president of the Champlain Valley chapter of the League of Women Voters, wrote of the benefits of single-payer healthcare [“League of Women Voters supports single payer health care in Vermont,” Letters, Sept. 3]: No deductibles, no co-pays, no need for subsidies, no need to update health information.
“Everybody in, nobody out,” she wrote.
And, our senator wants to run for president? What for? Where are the Jean Hopkinses who would serve us better and do so with less baggage than Bernie in his present incarnation?