Senate Finance summit missed the message
Letters to the Editor
A Cure for Our System
The Washington Post
June 19, 2008
While I welcome the heightened attention of policymakers, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, to our failing health-care system [Business, June 17], I was struck by how few real “prescriptions for change” emerged from the Senate Finance Committee’s health reform “summit” Monday.
All of the reforms mentioned, including what is being offered by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), keep the for-profit private insurance industry at the center of our system — and yet that industry is the main problem.
Private insurers profit by enrolling the healthy, screening out the sick and denying claims. They burden us with wasteful administrative costs, including outlandish executive salaries. We simply can’t afford this fragmented, inefficient system anymore.
What’s needed is an orderly transition to national health insurance, the kind of social insurance that most other industrialized nations take for granted. This “single-payer” approach has a track record of delivering better-quality care at lower cost. People end up living longer and are healthier. They go to the doctors of their choice, and everyone, without exception, has access to comprehensive care.
We need to get at the root of the problem and not be afraid to challenge the status quo.
Harvey Fernbach
College Park
The writer is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
The politicians in Washington are not in sync with the health care needs of the nation, but are tuned in to the concerns that the private insurance industry has about its own role in the future of health care financing. They seem to believe that all we need is more of the same: unaffordable private health plans that often fail to prevent financial hardship for those with significant health care needs. They are paralyzed by the meme that replacing our current system of financing health care with a system that would actually work is “not politically feasible.”
The politicians need to listen to the message of the protesters at the meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) in San Francisco today (and in other cities throughout the nation).
People don’t want crummy, unaffordable private health plans. They want health care. Washington needs to listen to our meme: HEALTH CARE FOR ALL! SINGLE PAYER NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE!