Letters, Redlands (Calif.) Daily Facts

Sept. 23, 2010

In “Health reform may hike costs” (Sept. 12), Dr. Dev Gnanadev asked, “Tell me how you can add more people to insurance and save money.” The simple answer is a single-payer system of insurance – Medicare for all.

Our current patchwork system takes the taxpayer for a sucker by saddling the government with the responsibility of caring for the poorest and sickest in Medicaid, Medicare and the VA while leaving private insurers to profit from the rest. Most other industrialized countries have better health care outcomes than we do at a lower cost because the profit motive in insurance is minimized or absent due to some form of a single payer.

A recent CNN poll asked, “Do you think the government should provide a national health insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes?” Sixty-four percent answered yes.

The American people want a real solution, but since the corporate interests that profit from the current system do not, we ended up with wasteful and incomplete “reform” that might be worse than what it replaced.

I hope that future articles in the Daily Facts on health care financing will dare to answer the questions that they pose.

Gerald Gollin, M.D.

Redlands

http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/letters/ci_16145661