Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Politics putting our health at risk

Regarding Karoun Demirjian’s March 11 story, “President’s ‘opt-out’ stance may force health care law onto crowded docket”:

Competitive health care marketplaces are a good start for driving down health care costs in Nevada. As the first anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act nears, the law is making health insurance a possibility for many people who previously relied on “free” emergency room fixes when injury or illness progressed too far to ignore.

But we know that it’s not “free.” It’s subsidized by all of us who pay higher health care costs to reimburse hospitals and other providers for the cost of treating the uninsured. Similarly, an automobile accident caused by an uninsured driver leaves me on the hook to fix my car and even my body. If my insurance company pays for the damages, my premiums will go up.

Yet we devised a way to prevent that from happening: We’re mandated to buy liability insurance. So why is a mandate to buy health insurance so hard to comprehend? Its opponents must be confused. They supposedly stress self-reliance and responsibility so that “hardworking taxpayers” don’t have to spend their “hard-earned money” to pay for other people’s health care.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would help ensure its success by lowering health care costs and increasing insurance accessibility for all. But it seems that some of our fellow citizens don’t want any program proposed by our president to succeed, no matter what the consequences. This is a clear case of partisan politics endangering our health and future, and we should recognize it as such.

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