It’s puzzling to me that the GOP is so against the Affordable Care Act. This is a system that was initially proposed and instituted by a Republican governor in Massachusetts. It asks people who are able to be responsible and buy insurance, and helps to make it more affordable for them — personable responsibility being a supposedly Republican tenant. It has helped millions who were uninsured to get insurance and uses private insurance companies to do this.

Instead of improving the system, which does have some problems, the GOP has made destroying it the bedrock of the party’s campaign rhetoric and has tried to replace it with a hastily thrown together mess that would leave millions without insurance.

It seems to me that if they succeed in destroying the Affordable Care Act and creating more chaos in our health care system that the next step is a single-payer system that covers all. Is that their secret plan? Many of us would welcome that.

Imagine if people could dare to start a small business without being worried about paying for health insurance for their families. Imagine if an employers didn’t feel they had to create constantly revolving work schedules to avoid giving people enough hours to make them eligible for health insurance. Imagine if people working several different jobs in the evolving “gig” economy didn’t have to worry about being insured.

Imagine living in a country with enough of a sense of community that we would all be willing to pay a bit more so that we could all be covered.

I realize that single payer it is not simple, but every advanced country in the world, and some not so advanced, has done a better and cheaper job of making health care available to their citizens than we have.

Priscilla “Penny” Markley

Winthrop


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