Brady Rivera
We’ve heard this line before — our current healthcare system is very unreliable and expensive for the average person. You pay thousands of dollars to a commercial insurance company, and you have to pay hundreds of out-of-pocket costs for medicines and services that are not yet covered by our plans.
With so much money coming out of our pockets and so many gaps in our plans, we start to wonder why we are charged so much for insurance.
But what can we do about this? We have an Affordable Care Method (ACA). This helps connect residents to health insurance companies and provide them with the best, money-safe options. It helped countless people get coverage that would not have been otherwise available. But is this really still enough? While the world’s most expensive health system continues to be more affordable, tens of millions of people remain uninsuranced.
Mercer County has an important Hispanic (18.5% or 71,658) and black (21.5% or 83,278) communities. As a public health worker at Mercer, I understand how the current healthcare system can help our community, but it still leaves behind many of us, especially people of color.
Many of us suffer from uninsured because we are at the forefront of both healthcare and the COVID-19 pandemic and come from the Trenton-Hamilton area, where blacks and Hispanics are most concentrated.
In both communities, more than 1 in 5 people are uninsured. This is enough to deal with this negligence as we are failing in the color community, despite living in the wealthiest country in the world and spending the most on medical care. Stupid stats that really show what you’re not doing.
It also does not mention the poverty cap created by the eligibility requirements under the ACA subsidy program. The more money these individuals or families make, the risk of losing health insurance beyond the income standards of these programs.
This creates an incentive to keep wealth below a certain level of income, hamper the liquidity of the upper classes and maintain wealth stagnation. All of this is to ensure that you can barely maintain affordable health insurance. Income-based programs run the risk of leaving thousands of people behind. This is both a public health issue and a racial issue.
Many of our own Mercer counties, including many of our lawmakers, already understand this. Congressman Bonnie Watson Coleman is a co-sponsor of the Medicare for All House bill, and the county committee unanimously passed a resolution calling on Congress to pass it. The local governments of Princeton and Trenton have passed a local resolution calling for the bill to be passed.
I can’t wait anymore. There is a growing movement to seek solutions at the scale of the crisis in our healthcare system. Several residents of the state’s Third Parliamentary District have attended the City Hall and have asked our delegation to support Medicare For All and continue to do so.
Andy Kim, this is an urgent call to support Medicare for All.
ACA never meant the end. It was intended to be a step towards improving our system. In order for us to be the wealthiest and most innovative country on the planet, we must take care of the people who actually work to do just that.
Brady Rivera is the chair of the election Our Revolution Trenton Mercer..
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