Endorsing Janoo

Everybody is in favor of healthcare reform and access to primary care. But, of the three gubernatorial candidates, only Amanda Janoo supports and advocates for publicly financed universal primary care, mental healthcare and substance use care as a first step toward publicly financed universal healthcare for all.

With public financing there will be no need for health insurance companies, which provide no care and siphon critical dollars from our system. One possible way to finance this program is with a tax on the wealthiest Vermonters equivalent to the tax cuts they received from Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.

Every other industrialized country has some form of guaranteed universal healthcare for all. Their healthcare is better and cheaper. The U.S. is an outlier. Vermont, our Brave Little State, can be a shining example of how a single-payer universal system can work.

Now is a unique opportunity to create this system in Vermont as premiums, co-pays and deductibles, skyrocket and access becomes more difficult. Business, school and municipal budgets are over-burdened by healthcare costs.

More than 50 years of bandaids have not fixed our dysfunctional, insurance-based system. Amanda Janoo will make this fundamental change happen. At the turn of the 20th century, when automobiles were introduced, the horse and buggy livery industry collapsed and disappeared. Let's do the same for the health insurance industry.

Dr. Jack Mayer

Middlebury