The state's top health official recently suggested that Maryland is working on a plan to extend basic health care benefits to all citizens. What, if anything, should the state do to ensure everyone has access to health care?
What Maryland should do to ensure that everyone has access to health care is pass the Health Care for All plan. Only then will every Marylander have guaranteed coverage.
Skyrocketing costs and the threat of losing health insurance threaten every employer and every working family. Every time labor bargains with management, health insurance is a top issue. It leads to more conflict and strikes than anything else.
We've tried managed care. It failed. We've tried shifting costs. That failed, too, and it only made things worse, because people delayed getting the care they needed -- only to require more expensive care in emergencies.
We have to work together for the good of all Marylanders. We're willing to do our part, and it's only fair to ask the same of every business.
Maryland has always been a leader in health care. Now is the time to take the next step: Health Care for All.
Fred Mason
Washington
The writer is president of the Maryland and Washington AFL-CIO.
Maryland should lead the way in introducing a health care system that replaces our present failed system, which now leaves 41 million Americans uninsured.
The state's new system must provide excellent medical care to every person, conception to grave, including total portability, freedom of choice of providers and local control.
This should be a single-payer system that follows the models that work in many nations around the world.
These systems prove that minimizing paperwork and malpractice premiums minimizes costs.
Maryland should become the nation's "pilot health care state," demonstrating how such a new system can be put into place without disturbing existing health care.
Dr. Ross Z. Pierpont
Timonium
Maryland needs Health Care for All in a desperate way. With 600,000 uninsured and many thousands more who lack decent health coverage, the time for Maryland to step forward with a solution is now.
I'm a 26-year-old who gets coverage through my employer. Yet most people my age are working in jobs that cannot currently offer insurance benefits. These young people are not deadbeats. They are hard-working people developing their careers in a time of unbelievably escalating health insurance costs.
The costs of providing care to the uninsured are staggering, and the Maryland Citizens' Health Initiative has developed a plan that is not only smart, fair and responsible but also fiscally possible in a time of economic doldrums.
Matthew Celentano
Baltimore
I am encouraged by the growing talk of health care for all in the state. It's about time. People who are self-employed and their families are in danger of being completely priced out of the health insurance market even though our businesses help drive the economy.
As a businessperson, I am willing to pay my fair share. I don't want free health care. I want affordable and comprehensive health care.
From what I've seen, the Health Care for All plan is the only show in town that makes sense.
Tom Beaver
Claiborne
Up to 30 percent of premiums received by for-profit HMOs are spent on administration, while single-payer systems, which exist in essentially all developed countries except the United States, have far lower administrative expenses -- about 1 percent in Canada and 3 percent in our national Medicare program.
Single-payer systems provide medical care that is equal to and sometimes better than the care available in this country -- care that is available immediately when needed.
Unfortunately, the conservative federal administration and Congress now in power wish to eventually hand over Medicare to for-profit medicine, hoping to save money through marketplace competition. However, experience in recent years has shown this hope to be false.
Dr. John W. Littlefield
Baltimore
The writer is professor emeritus of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
I have no health insurance and advocate a single-payer universal health care program in Maryland.
The CareFirst debacle illustrates the idiocy of allowing some people to profit from health care. I do not mind for-profit corporations selling sugar water. Caveat emptor. But I certainly object to for-profit health care.
Max Obuszewski
Baltimore
Given that a single-payer system, which would provide the most direct approach to universal care, is not feasible at this time, universal access to care needs to be built on the existing health care system.
Expanding existing programs such as Medicaid could help cover low-income people and children. And, building on the existing system, employers need to be encouraged through various financial incentives to continue and expand their role as a major source for individual and family insurance providers.
Individuals and families who are still uncovered would then need to be covered by some kind of public agency.
