Speaker's conclusions on health care wrong
Letter to the Editor
Palm Beach Daily News
Sunday, November 04, 2007
I found the article on [HSA Consulting Services president] Roy Ramthun’s health-care talk in (the Oct. 24) Shiny Sheet very interesting but I must take issue with his conclusions. One of these is that “. . . liberals promote covering the uninsured, but that involves taking subsidies away from those who have coverage. They want to cover everybody first and then deal with the cost.”
I am a liberal and am very active in a national campaign with the 14,000-member Physicians For a National Health Program. What we support is Medicare for everyone. It is expressed in the Conyers Bill, HR676, and calls for covering everyone without taking subsidies away from anyone.
It is the only proposal that carefully considered costs during the preparation of the legislation. According to a thorough study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, eliminating all of the middlemen now milking the health care system would result in a saving of at least $350 billion, enough to more than cover all of the uninsured. These figures come from government sources.
As it is now, costs are rising so outrageously that the 47 million without insurance have nightmares, worried over being hit with a serious medical condition. Too many of them find reality nightmarish when they actually are hit. In the words of Dr. Marcia Angell, for years editor in chief of the New England Journal and now a Harvard Medical School professor, “We can no longer afford not to have single-payer universal health care.
DR. H. DAVID PRENSKY
Palm Beach