Doctors commend new book to 111th Congress
January 28, 2009
Dear Member of Congress:
As you know, the cost of medical care is continuing to soar, making it increasingly unaffordable to millions of Americans. Health insurance is costing more (and covering less) all the time, with premiums alone now costing over $15,000 a year for a family of four. Co-pays and deductibles are skyrocketing. Over 46 million people have no coverage at all.
With no relief in sight, more Americans are delaying or forgoing necessary care, not filling prescriptions and suffering worse health outcomes as a result. Rising health costs are also hurting U.S. businesses, both large and small. And the current economic downturn has only made the crisis more acute.
While health reform is urgently needed, the conventional wisdom appears to be that only incremental changes are possible. But as we’ve seen in numerous state-based experiments, incremental reforms like the Massachusetts plan (in 1988 and today) consistently fail: they neither insure everyone nor contain costs. Such halfway measures share a fatal flaw — they preserve a central role for the wasteful and inefficient private health insurance industry.
“Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It,” a new book by Dr. John Geyman, documents how the private health insurance industry, with its 1,300 insurers, is obsolete, cannot remedy our system’s problems and in fact is a major problem in itself.
This book compares our present multi-payer system with a single-payer public financing system (“Medicare for All”) along the lines of the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers and over 90 others in the 110th Congress. It shows how single-payer financing, coupled with the strengths of our private delivery system, can wring out $400 billion in annual administrative savings from our present system, while preserving full choice of provider and hospital for our entire population and providing a structure for improving the quality of care. The book also documents the majority support that single payer enjoys among the public and physicians.
Dr. Geyman is widely experienced in primary care, medical education, research and writing on health policy. He is past president of Physicians for a National Health Program and a member of the Institute of Medicine. This is his sixth book.
We hope that you find this book informative and useful as you consider policy alternatives to assure access to affordable health care for all Americans.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Oliver Fein
PNHP President