Recently, in a town hall meeting, I listened as one of the Wayne County Commissioners commented on people coping with the $800 billion cut in health care in the Big Beautiful Bill. They discussed their personal health care challenges from the past. Not having any health care insurance back then, apparently, they made a good-faith offer to pay over time from their own pocket for a son’s broken arm. The hospital ultimately accepted half the standard fee. 

This was an honest and heartwarming story, but it had nothing to do with the looming health care disaster that is fast approaching Wayne County and most of rural America. Good faith and ethical intentions cannot pay the astronomical bills for childhood cancer treatments and other deadly health conditions that quickly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We all know stories of the financial ruin of relatives, friends and neighbors, where no amount of good faith can extract a family from the precarious condition that a lack of health care coverage brings.

Private health care insurance is in the business of making money from health care services. As an industry, it will not be rescuing the poor and lower-middle-class people who will be most harmed by the impending cuts. The money to cover the treatment of patients will be taken away and thus treatment will also disappear. Things will not stay the same. 

From a recent conversation I had with an employee at Wayne Memorial Hospital after the Big Beautiful Bill was passed, they said to me, “You mean this hospital could close?” After being taken aback, I said, “Yes, or at least that is what your CEO has said, publicly.”

The government, with its vast resources, is the only recognizable source for the massive injection of funds into health care that is necessary so that health care can be available for grandma and all of us. We need to join the modern world and make health care a right and not a birth-lottery prize. 

You think billionaires care about your health care and mine? Let’s figure this out, America; think medicine and treatment, not ideology.

John Pace
Honesdale, PA