Editor’s note: This letter to Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) was released to the Times-News for publication.

Dear Congressman Mollohan:

Now that Democrats control Congress, the time is ripe to rally support for HR 676, the Conyers Medicare For All Bill. You have free health care of the highest quality, but your constituents face a failed, fragmented, irrational, cruel, wasteful, and costly health care system — something doctors and health care professionals have been saying for years.

The elderly and disabled are covered by the remarkably efficient and popular Medicare, and the very poor have Medicaid, but the rest of us rely on increasingly costly insurance that covers less and less.

As you may be aware, 47 million citizens, many of them hard-working individuals, have no health insurance at all. How can this be when we spend more than $2 trillion a year on health care, two to three times per capita of any other country? Yet other industrialized countries spend far less while assuring health care to all citizens?

President Bush and a few states would address the problem with tax deductions for individuals who buy expensive private insurance. The administration admits these plans would only help 6 percent of the uninsured, mostly the rich, and would perpetuate the high administrative costs of private insurance — about 10 times that of Medicare — and its enduring obligation to put corporate profit ahead of patient care.

The crux of this matter lies in whether we believe the health of the country is more important than corporate greed.

Currently, unions worry about the affordability of adequate coverage, and business struggles with the soaring costs of coverage because foreign competition, mostly countries with national health insurance, is totally free of that expense.

I urge you to support HR 676. Huge savings would accrue from drastically simplified administrative procedures plus the proven efficiency of a universal risk pool. In the last Congress, 80 Democrats resisted well-financed opposition of the insurance industry and signed on as cosponsors of HR 676.

Please let me know you are now ready to join them, or, if not, why not. I look forward to your response on this most pressing domestic issue.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

Craig Etchison

Fort Ashby, W.Va.