By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
We now find that it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot, but that it is very practicable to heat it by continual Striking. – Benjamin Franklin
Affordability is now the issue that drives American politics, with 63 percent of Americans—including 47 percent of Republicans—supporting Medicare for All, even if it ends private insurance and raises taxes.
Translated, it means that the health care crisis is reaching a breaking point that elected officials and decision-makers can no longer ignore.
Support for such measures has risen 26 to 50 points since 2018, signaling that the ground is indeed shifting beneath us and that Americans are no longer willing to tolerate the status quo, as David Sirota recently argued in A Massive Shift in Health Care Politics.
If the tide is turning toward Medicare for All models and other health equity proposals, then Lucas County leaders cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.
Lucas County is the poster child for the affordability struggle that so many face in healthcare, housing and basic necessities.
If Lucas County can rally around economic development issues that benefit business leaders and downtown, yet leave out minorities — or convene area leaders and national experts at a summit to decry the lack of a coordinated anti-poverty plan, as they did in early October — why have we never brought the same urgency and seriousness to confront healthcare injustice?
Our own Healthy Lucas County data shows chronic disease rising fastest where coverage is thinnest. Black mothers face maternal mortality and prenatal barriers at unacceptable levels. Life expectancy levels between people of color and others are obscenely lopsided. The rates for hypertension, dialysis and amputations that could have been prevented are disgusting, as families delay care until a crisis because co-pays are unaffordable, transportation is limited, and preventive care feels like a luxury instead of a right.
You don’t have to teach Black and Brown families what medical inequity feels like — the billing statements prove that the most dangerous health decisions are often not medical — they are financial.
So here is what must happen next — clearly, urgently and without delay:
Lucas County should convene the region’s first Health Equity & Medicare-for-All Readiness Summit within the next 12 months — modeled with the same seriousness, structure and collaborative energy we saw in the economic summit. The table must seat the same stakeholders — county commissioners, healthcare systems, policy experts, insurers, union heads, lawmakers, grassroots advocates — but with health as the agenda, equity as the priority and public readiness for Medicare for All as the mandate.
Such a summit must be more than a blame session or finger-pointing debate. It must produce at a minimum:
- A coordinated countywide plan for health affordability and universal coverage access
— with timelines, metrics and accountability. - A strategy to expand clinics, neighborhood access, maternal health support and preventive care
— not in theory, but in budget line items and policy documents. - A roadmap for how Lucas County would implement or interface with Medicare for All
— so that if national reform accelerates, Toledo leads; if it stalls, Toledo advances anyway. - A decision about whether Black Toledo lives longer that becomes an actual, implemented policy, and not a philosophical debate about ideals.
The nation is clearly ready for bold reform. And Lucas County can no longer celebrate its economic strategy while ignoring the people’s mandate for a health strategy.
Instead, the county must decide whether to match the people’s readiness — or be remembered for hesitating while families suffered.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org