"I can't breathe" the last words attributed to two victims of police brutality, Eric Garner and George Floyd has become a haunting refrain of the Black Lives Matter movement. I was struck by the confluence of events we've witnessed in the past three months when I noticed someone wearing a mask emblazoned with that phrase.

"I can't breathe" were likely the last words uttered, or at least thought, by hundreds of coronavirus victims as they faced intubation and attachment to a ventilator. If and it's a big if they were lucky enough to be in a well-financed hospital with available ICU beds and staff to monitor them.

Data published in The New York Times revealed that, even accounting for differences in underlying health conditions and age, poor people living in communities with underfunded safety-net hospitals in New York City were up to three times more likely to die from their coronavirus infections than patients in hospitals managed by the same large corporations in wealthier parts of the city.

It's likely that this inequity held true in many socioeconomically and racially segregated cities from coast to coast as the pandemic spread.

And yet, both for-profit and nonprofit hospital systems have poured our health care dollars into capital improvements and continue to do so even during the pandemic, a direct result of the perverse incentives built into our health care system. When patients become customers, and health care is marketed as an exclusive luxury, public health concerns and stewardship of health care dollars fall by the wayside.

While the continuing efforts of President Donald Trump and his Republican apologists to dismantle the Affordable Care Act are reprehensible and shameful, it is also now quite evident that the accomplishments of that law were sharply limited by the concessions made to the insurance companies and other middlemen who contribute little value to our citizens' health needs.

I hope that the energy produced by the groundswell of indignation and outrage will not be wasted trying to shore up the ACA. We need a national health program that offers the same access and quality of care to every human being in America. The money saved by eliminating the health care profiteering of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries would amount to nearly $1 trillion annually. This is one-third of the country's total health care expenditures, and would easily cover the cost of extending coverage to 100 percent of Americans, with money left over to improve and expand what Medicare already guarantees.

The possibility of coverage for home care through the end of life would reduce the warehousing of our elderly in nursing homes, some of which became coronavirus death traps. Essential services like mental health care, dental and vision care should be universally available. Multiple studies have shown that a nationwide Medicare for All program would reduce the total cost of health care for over 90 percent of Americans, with any increase in taxes for the majority more than offset by lower out-of-pocket expenditures, the end of co-pays and constantly rising insurance premiums.

We must avoid the trap of allowing the for-profit hospitals and insurance companies to continue to connive to skim off the healthy, less-expensive patients, which they would certainly learn to do if we simply add a competing "public option" or "Medicare buy-in."

The health insurance industry has its knee on our necks. As surely as unregulated policing is a danger to the health of the most vulnerable among us (and by association, all of us), so unregulated profiteering in health care is making us sicker as individuals and as a society.

We must tell our elected officials to let us inspire equality, fairness, and hope for our own, our children's and our grandchildren's health by creating a system of equitable health care for all.

Dr. David Ray is chairman of the Capital District Alliance for Universal Health Care.

Follow this link:

Commentary: Universal health care system will save money and lives - Times Union