At Dwight Covid-19 testing site, where tests are free whether or not people have insurance.
(Opinion) New Haven and Hamden share many things: East Rock Park, the Farmington Canal trail, the 228 and 229 bus lines along Whitney Avenue, and, of course, the twin disasters currently unfolding as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first disaster is one of public health. Between New Haven and Hamden, well over 2,000 residents have tested positive for Covid-19. Over a hundred have died from the disease. There are doubtless many others who have gotten sick without being diagnosed.
The second is the economic fallout of state and local social distancing measures meant to curb the spread of the disease. In New Haven, unemployment claims are up a staggering 1,000 percent over last year. Statewide, unemployment numbers are closing in on 20 percent of the labor force — the worst since the Great Depression.
This economic catastrophe exacerbates New Haven and Hamden’s already fragile finances. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker projects a $15 million budget shortfall in the next fiscal year. Hamden, with over $1 billion in municipal liabilities and one of the highest mill rates in the state, doesn’t look much better.
There is no doubt that New Haven and Hamden will have to make difficult decisions and painful sacrifices to make it through these crises. But just as these problems are larger than any two cities, the solutions must be as well. And while there is no silver bullet program or piece of legislation that can undo all the problems stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, there is one that can mitigate the worst of them: Medicare for All.
Medicare for All would replace our hodgepodge of private and public insurers with a single, public health insurance system. By redirecting the money currently spent on health insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles into a single public system, Medicare for All would offer every resident of the United States comprehensive health care that’s free at the point of service.
For residents of Hamden and New Haven, that would mean losing a job wouldn’t result in the loss of employer-sponsored health insurance and access to care. For those sick with Covid-19, it would mean the chance to recover without fear of looming medical bills. (An uninsured patient can expect to pay nearly $75,000 for Covid-19 treatment.) As a matter of public health, it would mean no one neglecting testing or care out of concern for medical bills they can’t afford. For businesses already on the ropes, it would mean they could remain competitive as employers without the cost and administrative burden of offering their employees health care.
On the municipal finance front, Medicare for All would be a boon. In the mayor’s proposed 2020 – 2021 budget, New Haven will spend $84,398,210 on employee health benefits, nearly 15 percent of the total budget. In Hamden’s budget for the same fiscal year, proposed by Mayor Curt Leng, the cost of health benefits is $46,077,500, close to 20 percent of the total budget. And those costs are rising; experts predict health insurance premiums to increase by as much as 40 percent next year. Medicare for All would not eliminate these costs completely — any plan to fund it would almost certainly involve employer-side federal payroll taxes — but it would free up millions of taxpayer dollars at a time when every penny counts. (Not to mention similar savings at the state level, which cities and towns could lobby Hartford to pass on to municipalities.)
In short, the people of Hamden and New Haven need Medicare for All. But we can’t get it on our own. We need to demand our representatives in Congress to act. Luckily, these demands are happening.
Last month, the Hamden Democratic Town Council voted to endorse a resolution urging the town’s congressional delegation to support and pass Medicare for All. After the current budget season, the resolution will advance to the Hamden Legislative Council and hopefully be passed as it has in places like New London, New Orleans and Los Angeles. Communities in New Haven and around the state — spearheaded by the grassroots group Medicare for All Connecticut —are organizing around similar legislation. The goal is to demonstrate in no uncertain terms the popular demand for health justice.
To be clear, the American health care system was a disaster well before the current pandemic. Last year 187,000 people in Connecticut alone lacked health insurance, to say nothing of the underinsured whose access to care is impeded by unaffordable co-pays and deductibles, or those pushed to the financial brink by medical debt. But Covid-19 has laid bare our current system’s inexcusable shortcomings. There is no more time to waste; we must make clear the need for a just, humane, and equitable health care system.
As of this writing, only one member of our district’s delegation in Washington supports Medicare for All: Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ Senate Bill 1129, the Medicare for All Act of 2019. Senator Chris Murphy and Representative Rosa DeLauro refuse to support single-payer health care. It’s time to change their minds. Because New Haven and Hamden share so much, we must stand together and demand Medicare for All.
Peter Cunningham is an activist with the Central Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America and Medicare for All CT.
I am proud to sign on to the opinions contained within this thoughtful writing. Thank you Peter!
Medicare for All is a sensible centrist solution to America's dangerous fifty year experiment in medicine-for-profit, an experiment that can now easily be said to have failed.
Medicare for All will be a transition toward the system employed by most countries around the world presently and historically, a public health service, in which medical professionals are employed by the government to provide medical services with low or no cost at the point of service.
I have to admit, it would put a lot of attorneys like myself out of work, not to have huge medical bills piling up for people when they need medical assistance. But in my view, this is a trade-off well worth making.
The whole point of politics, from my perspective, is to make people's lives better and move society more toward a humane system -- one with something like Medicare for All. It's one of my litmus tests. It's one of the reasons I'm running for office.
Alex Taubes