The Dec. 26 editorial “Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter” criticized the United Kingdom’s National Health Service and falsely suggested that Britain’s system resembles Medicare-for-all, legislation that I have introduced in the Senate and which has 17 co-sponsors. That comparison is inaccurate and obscures a more important truth: Many of the problems The Post attributed to the NHS are far more prevalent in the United States.
The Post describes the U.K. system as costly but conveniently ignored the fact that the United States spends far more on health care per capita than any major country on Earth — $14,885 per person each year — more than double what the United Kingdom, Canada and France spend.
The result: More than 27 million Americans are uninsured. About 1 in 4 have difficulty affording prescription drugs. And an estimated 500,000 people go bankrupt each year because of medical debt.
The Post also called the NHS inefficient. In reality, it’s the American health care system that is bureaucratic and wasteful.
Medicare-for-all is not a government-run, British-style National Health Service system. It is a government-funded universal insurance program. Medicare-for-all would simply expand Medicare — a program that has worked extremely well for more than six decades — to cover every American, eliminate premiums and out-of-pocket costs, give people the freedom to choose their doctors, and ensure no one is denied care.
Every other major nation has figured out how to provide universal health care at far lower cost. The question is whether the United States will finally do the same.
Bernie Sanders, Washington
The writer, an independent, is a senator from Vermont.
What California’s task force found
In its Dec. 20 editorial “Wes Moore is right about reparations,” the Editorial Board called Maryland’s commission to study Black reparations “foolish” because it is “too complicated to ascertain whose ancestors wronged whom more than 150 years ago.”
The California Reparations Task Force, of which I was a member, found that though slavery “was our nation’s ‘original sin,’ emancipation did not bring an end to the atrocities and deprivations visited upon African Americans. Through lynching and other terror, including the Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, and neglect in every facet of life, government at all levels has perpetuated the legacy of slavery. African Americans as a group … live with the persistent consequences of this legacy.”
The harms were not just the result of wrongs perpetrated by individuals 150 years ago, they were the result of government policies designed to systematically subjugate Black Americans.
The Post cited examples of individual Black success to dismiss even the study of reparations, but it ignored huge group disparities that persist. According to a 2021 report from the National Association of Realtors, Maryland’s Black homeownership rate is 52 percent while White ownership is 76 percent. And though Black people make up about 14 percent of the total population, they constitute nearly 40 percent of the federal prison population.
When Congress passed — and President Ronald Reagan signed — the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, they did not view reparations for Japanese Americans as “foolish” or “too complicated.” Nor did the Florida legislature view reparations as “foolish” or “too complicated” when in 1994 it approved them for survivors and descendants of the Rosewood Massacre of 1923.
Maryland legislators deserve praise for the courage of their convictions in advancing reparations as long-overdue simple justice.
Donald K. Tamaki, San Francisco
A verification failure
The Dec. 25 Metro article “New U-Va. leader’s past DEI efforts draw conservative ire,” on Scott C. Beardsley’s revised curriculum vitae should be read as a presidential-search problem: a failure of basic verification.
For more than a decade, my research has examined how presidential searches are conducted, how candidates are vetted and why some searches produce leaders who succeed while others lead to avoidable crises. The most consistent finding is that process matters. A search insulated from independent scrutiny invites preventable error.
In well-designed searches, vetting is a discipline built into every stage — document review, reference gathering and campus engagement — because the risks of a presidential appointment are high and long-lasting. Search firms can help coordinate that work, but they cannot substitute for the independent scrutiny that comes from a broadly constituted search committee and meaningful faculty participation.
Faculty involvement is not symbolic; it is quality control. Faculty and senior staff know the institution’s public record, identify inconsistencies in language and claims and are more likely to ask the questions that an overly managed search is designed to avoid. They compare public materials across versions, test narratives against observable performance and insist on explanations when something doesn’t add up.
The changes in Beardsley’s public CV are exactly the kind of discrepancy a serious search process would have surfaced immediately.
When a candidate’s documented record can be materially misrepresented during an active search without triggering inquiry, the problem is not the candidate’s editing. The problem is the search architecture.
Judith Wilde, Albuquerque
The writer is a research professor at George Mason University.
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