Editor:

Our local city councils and community service districts are signing a resolution for positive change in Humboldt County. The issue: Will California adopt a universal, not-for-profit, single-payer healthcare system? The bills currently in place to establish a single-payer system are: CalCare, Assembly Bill 1400 and in Congress, House Resolution 1976. This resolution of support for the bills has now been signed by the city councils of Trinidad, Arcata, Blue Lake and Eureka and the community service districts of Manila and Willow Creek.

The resolution will send a message to our legislators in Sacramento that we must end today's usurious, wasteful, predatory health insurance practices that unilaterally raise premiums, constrain us within narrow networks, deny care and question and control our medical providers' prescribed procedures and drug treatments.

Corporate health insurance agencies (and Big PhaRMA) waste 30 cents on the dollar on profit, big salaries and bonuses, shareholder payouts, advertising (guess who pays for all those TV ads), lobbying and bureaucratic overhead.

A single-payer healthcare system would give every resident a lifetime card guaranteeing access to doctors and hospitals of choice, for any medical treatment, including vision, dental and hearing, long-term care and more. No more premiums, deductibles, co-pays, doctor or hospital bills.

Humboldt County governmental agencies and service districts now spend more than $20.6 million buying health plans for their employees. A single-payer system would lift that entire financial burden by supplying care that is not attached to employment. How much better that money could be spent for real social services that benefit us all.

We now ask the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to sign this resolution. Please contact our supervisors and advise them to do the right thing to help make our county fiscally and physically healthy!

More info at www.healthcareforall.org and www.pnhp.org.

 Patty Harvey, Willow Creek