“All I can say is what a difference guaranteed health care makes. The peace of mind alone is worth it.”
Opinion: Giving business a break with Medicare for all
After years of struggling to pay our health insurance premiums – which always go up, by the way – I am thrilled that Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington has introduced a new Medicare-for-All bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. The United States has another chance to get health care right! You can bet I’ll be contacting my legislators to express support for this bill.
Why? Because like thousands of other Angelenos, my husband and I work in the entertainment industry. We own and operate a small, independent production company. It’s a two-man operation. We work project-to-project. It’s truly feast or famine. Every penny counts. I know, because I pay the bills.
Through the years, both before Obamacare and after, we’ve had to cough up those premiums no matter how little money we had. There were years we had to choose which one of us would go uninsured so we could afford to pay the premiums for our only daughter. We always managed to keep her covered, but it was scary.
Once, when my husband didn’t have insurance and got a really bad flu, he had to go to urgent care. They prescribed him medicine that cost $300! There was no way we could pay that, but the doctor insisted he needed it. My stomach was in knots. People die from not being able to afford care and it could have been my husband. In the end, she gave us some samples.
Even after Covered California, costs keep going up. It’s supposed to be the Affordable Care Act but the year before last, I had a 47 percent premium increase. How is that affordable?
It affects us in many ways. Our business, for example, requires us to keep up with the latest technology. If we can’t invest in ourselves, we can’t compete. We won’t have the technology our customers need. We have to rent equipment, at a cost, instead of owning it ourselves, as an investment.
But premiums have to be paid no matter what. They come first – before investing in our business, before saving for our daughter’s education, before saving for retirement. Oh, yeah, forget about retirement.
Something had to give.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Several times our work required us to travel overseas and collaborate with industry professionals in countries with single-payer-type systems.
All I can say is what a difference guaranteed health care makes. The peace of mind alone is worth it. My husband and I want that for our country. Having to worry if you can afford your health care is a quality-of-life issue. So is the freedom to see the doctors you want. Right now, we have to pay higher premiums so our daughter can keep her same medical team.
As for changing how we pay for care – eliminating premiums, coinsurance and deductibles, and paying taxes instead – I’m all for it. Bring on the taxes.
We’ve seen how this works when we’ve been overseas. People never worry if they can afford to see a doctor. They do very well, in spite of the taxes they pay. They can afford to own a home, to care for their children. Health care is not a burden.
I’m not being naïve. An economic analysis of the 2016 California single-payer bill showed that middle-income families like mine could save over 8 percent a year on what they pay for health care. Even people who get their insurance subsidized by their employer could save over 2.5 percent. Only the very highest income families would pay a little more (1.7 percent). A national plan could save even more!
A combination of taxes, such as a payroll tax, a sales tax on non-essential goods and/or a gross receipts tax on large businesses would assure that everybody would pay their fair share.
With the savings from making health care more efficient, the taxes would be way less than the premiums and out-of-pocket costs we are paying now.
Remember, premiums always cost what they cost, no matter how much (or how little) money we have. But our taxes go up and down depending on how much we earn. When we earn more, we pay more. When we earn less, we pay less. That’s fair.
Contact your congressional representatives to voice support for Jayapal’s new bill. And keep this critical issue alive with California lawmakers. Urge them to take the lead with a state bill. With Medicare for All, our businesses will thrive. So will our communities.
Betty Doumas-Toto is a small business owner in the entertainment industry who lives in Northridge. She is a volunteer for Health Care for All San Fernando Valley.
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