Can Health Insurers Be Cost-Cutters?
Laura S. Boylan
Letter to the Editor
New York Times
May 11, 2009
To the Editor:
Paul Krugman outlines proposed cost-cutting by the “medical-industrial complex.” Why, thank you, medical- industrial complex! How nice to suggest lowering costs.
At the risk of seeming ungrateful, I wish to point out that the problem with voluntary cost reduction is that it’s voluntary. As long as the logic of our system is set by a huge for-profit multipayer bureaucracy, we will continue to get low value on the health care dollar.
Our nation’s ability to afford decent health care for all our citizens must not depend on voluntary self-regulation of for-profit entities. We need single-payer national health insurance. Let’s circle the wagons around health care, not around private insurance companies and Big Pharma.
The writer, a clinical associate professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, is on the board of directors of Physicians for a National Health Program, Metro New York.