(By phone) I support single-payer health care, in the form of the (Rep. John) Conyers bill that’s sitting in Congress getting co-sponsors right now, HR 676.

It’s got the things that people worry about the most – long-term care, mental health parity, prescription drugs and others. And there are consequences to our economy of not doing the things that are included in this bill.

When mental-health needs go unmet, it is a huge driver of the prison population, including when people don’t have access to prescription drugs that can help them avoid the consequences of going off their medications. There are bankruptcy issues, and I’ve heard many very sad stories of people who, after 100 days in a facility, no longer have Medicare coverage. It’s a pretty big economic hit on a family to keep someone in hospice care after 100 days are over.

With prescription drugs, we know people are trying to figure out which of the bills they can pay, and we need them to stay on medication because it is helping to prevent other hospitalization costs.

The way we are going right now, we have lucky and unlucky people. The lucky people are the ones who tried to buy insurance, and they don’t have a pre-existing condition as defined by the insurance companies.

For the unlucky ones, many people are going without health care coverage. Some cannot buy it at any cost, and some cannot afford premiums that might reach $1,200 to $1,500 per month for a couple. Sometimes, peoples’ premiums are larger than their mortgages, and that’s a pretty big hit.

As a country, we are less competitive when we have to add the employer’s cost of health care to the price of a product. It’s obvious that the administrative costs of private health care are up in the 15-20 percent range, while Medicare is in the under-five-percent range. And another thing universal single-payer would take care of is that everybody would have health care – it wouldn’t be tied to employment.

We’ve heard the threats of what socialized medicine does, but even under private insurance, you may be denied service, and you may also have a long wait time, depending on your carrier. There are examples of public health care that work very well, and I don’t think we should cling to a broken system out of fear that we’re not going to produce something better.