The Tribune sets up a false choice in characterizing America’s health-reform options as either more spending or less care (“Search for a cure,” Editorial, May 13).
Research and experience have shown that quality care and universal coverage are achievable without additional expense.
It is wasteful insurance companies that stand in the way. Single-payer health care — an established American tradition — already provides for our seniors, veterans and military servicemen. It is time to make this working model — Medicare — available to all.
Our real “nightmare bureaucracy” comes from private insurers. One-third of our health spending is squandered on marketing, billing, underwriting, retroactively canceling policies and other useless activities that sustain insurers’ profits but divert resources from care. Eliminating this needless expenditure — not limiting care — could recover more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive coverage for all.
But these savings are only achievable by replacing our patchwork of insurance companies with a public, single-payer system.
The market reforms promoted by the Tribune’s editorialists would add additional layers of bureaucracy to our already paperwork-heavy system, further burdening the U.S. economy and ensuring new restrictions on patient treatment choices. Employers have figured out that universal coverage is good business: More cars are now produced in Ontario than in Michigan.
Single-payer would relieve U.S. business of the costly burden of administering health benefits and establish a long-term mechanism for financing care. Public payment would liberate physicians from for-profit HMO dictates over what care they can provide. Patients would have free choice of doctor and hospital.
Because they exclude for-profit insurers, other nations achieve superior health outcomes for half our spending or less. Brits and Canadians have lower rates of nearly every chronic disease. America performs similar to or worse than other industrialized countries on most major health indicators.
A newly published international comparison ranked the U.S. health system worst or second worst in quality, access, efficiency, equity and healthy lives. Other countries also ration care less: Whereas at least 18,000 Americans die annually due to a lack of health coverage, in a recent survey only 3.5 percent of Canadians reported problems with waits for care.
America’s health-reform debate does not require new solutions. Indeed the options being considered now differ little from those available in 1970. The true problem is that the power of the current system’s profiteers — insurance and pharmaceutical giants — intimidates lawmakers away from the only proven prescription.
Quentin Young, MD, National coordinator, Physicians for a National Health Program; Co-founder, Health Care for All Illinois, Chicago
