Tribune columnist Joan Beck (“A hard look at the failure of managed care,” Commentary, Aug. 2) has laid an egg.
Having acknowledged a growing dissatisfaction with our market-driven system of health care and having spent the better part of her column citing Quentin Young’s spirited arguments in support of a single-payer national program like Canada’s, she shamefully joins naysayers who dwell upon Medicare abuses, Pentagon-type cost overruns and government incompetence. Beck closes with this observation: “Economic and political trends are toward more privatization, not more government involvement.” The egg.
Let me abandon Ms. Beck to her trends while I, unmoved, strengthen the case for a single-payer national program that would closely follow Canada’s successful model.
Clearly, the health-care system is a mess–and getting worse as private market forces seek to rationalize it. The shift to a single-payer program, like Canada’s, would cut this Gordian knot at a stroke.’
The cost? By their nature, universal systems spend much less money on wasteful overhead. There is no expenditure on risk selection or marketing, no diversion of profit to shareholders, and far less interference from people outside the medical community. Every nation with a universal system spends a smaller percentage of its GDP on health care than does our United States. And, contrary to popular belief, they satisfy most patients along the way.
Clearly, insurance company-driven privately managed care has failed, and no amount of tinkering will save it.
