1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

California has an opportunity to lead the nation away from a failing profit-driven healthcare model that is collapsing under its own weight. One year after the December 4, 2024 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson exposed widespread public anger over healthcare costs and denied claims, the crisis has only deepened. The current system is failing both patients and the companies profiting from it. Nearly half of U.S. adults expect they won't be able to afford necessary healthcare next year according to Gallup polling. Jennifer Blazis, a 44-year-old Colorado Springs mother of four, is postponing needed leg surgery despite having what she considers good insurance because of cost concerns. This is happening while Affordable Care Act subsidies are set to expire at year-end, threatening to cause premiums to skyrocket for 24 million exchange participants and affecting the 154 million people with employer-sponsored plans. The profit-driven model is unsustainable even for the corporations themselves. UnitedHealth Group, which owns the largest U.S. health insurance company and employs or oversees 10% of doctors while processing 20% of prescriptions, has seen its stock plunge 44% from a year earlier. The company faces a Department of Justice investigation into its Medicare operations and is attempting to shed about 1 million Medicare Advantage patients. Katherine Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation describes this as an inflection point where every segment of the health insurance business is stressed. I urge you to champion fundamental healthcare system overhauls that prioritize nonprofit, patient-centered care models. California has the scale and resources to demonstrate that healthcare can serve people rather than shareholders. When a system satisfies neither the people it serves nor those profiting from it, the answer is not incremental reform but transformational change toward models that put patient welfare first.