Dr. Dennis Nave writes a vital prescription in "Working Americans need affordable health care, quality education," (Sept. 1, 2017). Those who build our economy should have what all other developed countries have: universal, guaranteed healthcare. We simply need the political will to get there.

Not only workers benefit from universal healthcare; businesses do. The New York Health Act -- one state Senate sponsor away from a majority -- would save employers billions by providing a simplified plan that covers all medically necessary care. Imagine your business model if all of your employees and customers have health coverage! State Sens. John DeFrancisco, Patty Ritchie and Pam Helming could tip the balance by sponsoring the New York Health Act.

Medicare-for-all (HR 676) in the U.S. House of Representatives has 117 co-sponsors. We need Republicans like Rep. John Katko, who voted against the American Health Care Act and supports Medicare, to sign on to expanded Medicare-for-all.

Read the full letter at the Syracuse Post-Standard here.

The headline reads “Armonk Woman’s Medicaid Battle Imperils Her Health Care” — while the article explains how it threatens her health and life. It omits the solution increasing number of New Yorkers are calling for: the universal, comprehensive, low-cost coverage of the NY Health Act.

Read the full letter at the Examiner here.

After a long and painful struggle to maintain the Affordable Care Act, 30 million individuals still lack basic health care. Furthermore, high administrative costs and subsidies to stabilize the insurance market continue to place a heavy and unnecessary financial burden on taxpayers.

A single-payer system would eliminate added costs imposed by insurance companies, and extend care to all who need it.

According to one Kaiser poll, 58 percent of Americans favor Medicare for all. However, powerful special interest groups that reap huge profits from the status quo influence legislators in Washington and Albany to oppose legislation of this kind.

Read the full letter at the Riverdale Press here.

The basic flaw in the Affordable Care Act is that it leaves us in the hands of insurance companies. That means rising premiums and deductibles, restricted provider networks and high out-of-network charges; huge multiple administrative bureaucracies and profits; and the costs that doctors and hospitals incur for dealing with them.

We should start with a basic principle: No American should be denied health care or suffer financially trying to pay for it. What makes that “tricky” — and forces health policy into contortions — is insisting on taking care of insurance companies and their hefty costs and finances.

Read the full letter at the New York Times here.

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If we consider the experience of Dowling's brother, we should also consider the hundreds of millions of Europeans and Canadians for whom publicly financed health care is cheaper, outcomes are better and satisfaction is higher. To them, our system isn't "innovative," as Levy says — it's a mess, and not one to emulate.

Levy claims Europeans "flock to the U.S. by the thousands." Compare that difficult-to-verify statistic against the 1.4 million Americans who were projected to travel elsewhere for medical care last year. It's no wonder, since the U.S. routinely comes in last in health outcomes among developed countries.

Read the full letter at the Times-Union here.

Wouldn’t you like to make decisions about treatments and drugs with your doctor, without an insurance company intervening in your decisions? Wouldn’t you like to receive no or minimal bills for health care? It’s possible with a single payer health care system.
 
The Assembly has passed a single payer health care bill (A4738); the New York Senate version remained in committee (S4840). That’s one reason why I will be voting for Democrat Robert Kesten who will be running against the republican incumbent Terrence Murphy in the 40th New York State Senate District in 2018. Murphy does not support single payer. 

Read the rest of the letter here at the Times-Union here. 

We hear a great deal about the 20 million people who will lose health care with the current proposals for repealing the Affordable Care Act. Under the ACA, we still have 30 million people without access to medical care, so with the proposed cuts, we would see 50 million people without access to medical care.

Our population is only 320 million.

We also hear that 30 percent of the premiums we pay to insurance companies do not go to medical care. That is a lot of money — billions. The premiums pay for administrative costs, CEO salaries, and dividends to shareholders. In addition, in order to keep the insurance companies in business and “stabilize the market,” we pay subsidies (corporate welfare) to the insurance companies out of our taxes.

I do not think we can afford this. We, the public, are paying money to support an industry that doesn’t actually do anything but push paper and money around, and neglects 50 million people.

Read the full letter at the Riverdale Press here.

Thank you, Post-Star, for your very informative articles about how American health care compares to health care in the rest of the world. As citizens and voters we need to know these facts which are apparently being completely ignored by our government. Republican lawmakers, intent on rushing through any wretched “plan” that will eradicate the name and accomplishments of President Obama, seem oblivious to the fact that a market-based system will never provide adequate, affordable health care for all.

Read the full letter at the Post-Star here

Thank you for your side-by-side publishing of the commentaries on single payer health insurance from Assemblyman Phil Steck, D-Colonie, ("Case for single payer?" July 16) and Dr. John D. Bennett, president and CEO of Capital District Physicians Health Plan ("There's really no such thing as a free health plan," July 16).

It illustrated perfectly the contrast between Steck's concern for the problems of the citizenry and medical professionals vs. Bennett's concern for the medical insurance industry, and perhaps for his more-than-$1 million compensation package.

Read the full letter at the Times-Union here.

The Sunday front page article on U.S. health care precipitated some thoughts. First, I am suspect that the U.S. ranks below some of these countries like Syria, Turkey, Ethiopia and Libya in some categories. However, the general message was clear. Second, it seems to me that we should at least look at health care system that we could study and learn from. Are there possibly five or seven experts in the U.S. that we could count on (independent of politics and not bought by some entity) to do a comprehensive study of some form of single-payer.

Read the full article at the Post-Star here.

Readers of Sara Price’s letter “Don’t concentrate power in Albany” (July 14), are led to believe that a rather simple, common sense plan to provide the people of our state with good health care, at a considerable savings from what they now spend trying to get health care, is a grave and imminent danger. Scary stuff, but not half as scary as the current system.

Read the full letter at the Press and Sun-Bulletin here.

“AHCA health care cuts would harm upstate economy” (pressconnects.com, July 6) is a call to action for our representatives. We need to go beyond plans to gut our public health system costing jobs and lives.

Millions would lose insurance and funding for the poor and elderly would disappear. The bill should be opposed by our senators and Rep. Tenney.

I work as a physician at a public clinic providing mental health care. Every day I see patients' care compromised by the broken health system we have. Those covered by Medicaid, now controlled by private insurance companies, see their coverage canceled or lapse. Medications require burdensome paperwork for approval. Those who are in the working class often don't qualify for Medicaid and can't afford the skyrocketing premiums, deductible and co pays from insurance exchanges.

Sen. Gillibrand has joined a growing group of senators who support improved and expanded Medicare for all. In New York, we are one state senator away from passing the New York Health Act, which would also provide universal coverage. State Sens. Seward and Akshar should co-sponsor the New York Health Act. Our health and businesses depend on it.

Read the letter at the Press and Sun-Bulletin here.

In last week’s Sound Off, some writers seem confused about how New York Health Act might affect their finances. Even though the bill would technically be a “tax increase,” a single-payer system would actually save us lots of money for three main reasons:

1) Employers currently pay tens of thousands of dollars per year per employee for private insurance, so directing some of that money to the single-payer system instead of high-cost private insurance will leave more money for workers and small businesses.

2) Up to 20 percent of what insurance companies charge goes to administrative costs and profit. Single-payer would cost closer to 1 percent in overhead, like public Medicare. So the total costs for care will be less.

3) New Yorkers making over 400,000/year would pay their fair share for health care, so that people making under 400,000/year (98 percent of us!) can pay far less. For example, everyone making under 50k will pay ZERO for health care.

Read the full letter at the Daily Star here.

LINDLEY — Rep. Tom Reed, R-Corning, hosted two town halls Saturday, one at the Belfast Fire Department and another afterward at the Lindley-Presho Volunteer Fire Department.

In Lindley the discussion included the normal town hall topics, beginning with healthcare before touching on issues such as the Russia controversy and the environment. The town halls were the first Reed’s hosted since the GOP baseball shootings in early June.

Reed said in Washington, he believes the Senate will make a determination Tuesday on whether to move forward with the new GOP-led healthcare bill.

Read the full story at Wellsville Daily Reporter.

Now, it is vital for readers to understand the sources of Senator Little’s data are from opposition research groups and are not impartial studies. They were chosen specifically to refute the truly independent studies we offered which supports New York Health. 

Read the full letter at the Post-Star here.

The Daily Star’s July 5th editorial on a single-payer health care plan was spot-on. Not only would it benefit millions of people, but the New York Health Act would be good for business, too.

Retail, service and agricultural businesses could get out of the health care business and concentrate on growing their own business. Their employees would be healthier and with everybody in the system there would be no need for mandates.

Read the full letter at the Daily Star here.

My organization, Long Island Activists, wants Republican state senators to support the New York Health Act, a single-payer plan. In the legislative session that just ended, the Republicans refused to allow the bill to come to a vote, even though it had 31 co-sponsors in this 63-member chamber.

While other groups are focusing on protecting a failed status quo — the Affordable Care Act — my organization believes that Medicare-for-all is the only viable solution to provide affordable health care for all Americans.

Read the original letter at Newsday here.

Thank you for your editorial supporting single-payer health care, which would simplify and extend coverage to all Americans for all medically necessary treatments without premiums, co-payments, or deductibles. Volunteers in our area have organized for this for decades. The latest poll shows 60 percent of Americans now support a single-payer plan.

In the Senate, support for single-payer is growing: Long-time supporter Bernie Sanders has been joined by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and now our own Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. And in the House, as of early July, 113 U.S. Representatives have signed on as co-sponsors of H.R. 676, the House single-payer bill. However, our representative, John Faso, refuses to sign onto the bill. Instead, he twice voted to take away insurance from 23 million Americans — including thousands in our area. It seems he wants to return us to the days before Obamacare, when 52 million Americans were uninsured.

Read the full letter at the Daily Star here.

POUGHKEEPSIE — As this year’s state legislative session came to a close, health insurance companies announced their intent to take 17 percent more money from their customers in New York next year than they did this year. One company wants to raise rates by as much as 47 percent.

We could have ended this gouging of ordinary people by enacting the New York Health Act, a bill that guarantees access to quality, affordable healthcare to every New Yorker through a Medicare-for-all system. So far, President Donald Trump has failed to throw more than 2.7 million New Yorkers off health insurance by getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. But he is sure to try again, and a durable remedy is urgently needed. To that end, in May my Assembly colleagues and I passed the New York Health Act for a third consecutive year, but my friends in the Republican-controlled Senate did not. Read the full story at Poughkeepsie Journal.

Herb Masser's July 3 diatribe against single-payer health insurance is logically flawed.

He asks us to imagine that New York has mandated that there be only one car dealer in New York. He asks us to imagine there is only one store for us to buy groceries.

We do not get our health care from insurance companies. We get our health care from doctors, nurses and hospitals. We are not being told that there will only be one doctor, one nurse or one hospital for us to get our health care from.

Do not listen to fallacious arguments against single-payer health care.

Read the original letter at the Ithaca Journal here.

When politicians refuse to do the most simple aspect of their job, we all suffer. The progress of progressive legislation coming to a vote in the New York State Senate has been abysmal.

Time, after time again, the NYS Senate has pushed back voting on many progressive bills that have passed the NYS Assembly. Our NYS Senators Diane Savino and Andrew Lanza have the power to change that.

Read the full letter at the Advance here.

ONEONTA — Let’s face it, you don’t understand all the nuances of Obamacare or the various Republican plans to replace it.

Don’t feel bad. Neither do we.

Like you, however, we can easily figure out that a Republican scheme that would take health insurance away from more than 20 million Americans over the next 10 years and remove $800 billion or so from Medicare funding isn’t going to be particularly popular.

That’s why only 12 percent of Americans support the GOP plan, according to the USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll released Friday. Read the full story at The Daily Star.

The Senate is writing a health-care bill in secret because they are ashamed or should be ashamed of a bill that is simply inhumane.

In their heart of hearts if they pretend to care about their fellow man, which at this point, is in serious doubt, this travesty would never see the light of day.

Shame on all you guys; note that a bunch of men only are concocting this unprincipled bill.

And defunding Planned Parenthood just adds to the irony.

Let us go back to basics; you should grow up and admit that health care should not be a business.

Read the full letter at the Island Now here.

Remember the “death panels” we were warned about a decade ago? Well, there’s one operating behind closed doors right now that will take health insurance from tens of millions of Americans. They assure us lack of health insurance doesn’t kill—and that millionaires need massive tax cuts.
Here on Long Island, we wait—neither of our NY Senators will vote for the “Repeal and Reform” AHCA. (Representatives Peter King and Lee Zeldin each voted “aye.”)
We can, however, work to protect New Yorkers from the consequences of this deadly bill.
The New York Health Act is currently tied up in the NY Senate Healthcare Committee, chaired by NY Senator Kemp Hannon, representing Long Islanders just south of us. He is supported by our NY Senator, Elaine Phillips, whose office often doesn’t ask for the names or addresses of constituents supporting this bill “because there are so many.”

Read the full letter at the Manhasset Press here.