The good news in this report is that the often stated claim that physicians are dumping Medicare patients in favor of privately insured patients is not really true, at least as of 2008. Although there has been a small decline in the numbers of physicians accepting Medicare, well over 90 percent still do. Contrary to claims otherwise, the decline in the acceptance of privately insured patients was even greater.

Read these excerpts from Jonathan Oberlander’s article, and you’ll understand much better why the Affordable Care Act will fail to control health care costs. Has our reform been driven by ignorance, as he suggests? With the great body of health policy literature available to us, how could that be? It seems more likely that ego and greed are much more powerful policy drivers.

Was reform intended to benefit patients or insurers? As the reform process evolved, the insurers were dictating the policies. Understandably, they took care of their own interests first. Their lack of concern for patients is confirmed by the fact that their policies will leave 23 million people without any coverage and tens of millions more with inadequate coverage.

Policy is easy. Politics isn’t. For the United States, the politics of collective action on health reform has been one bridge too far. Let’s now build that bridge.

The private health insurance industry’s primary product that they are selling us is administrative services. How well are they doing? One-fifth of the claims that they process are in error. Medicare does better, but in using private billing contractors, their claims are still incorrect 4 percent of the time. We’re sure paying a lot to an industry that is doing such a lousy job.

Having cancer and facing the agony of treatment is bad enough without also having to face the financial burdens of treatment. As this and many other reports show, “financial toxicity” can seriously impair the ability to meet other basic needs, and may even result in personal bankruptcy.

Most of you are aware of the important role that Deb Richter has played in advancing health care reform in the state of Vermont, where every effort is being made to bring Vermont in compliance with the policies and goals of a single payer system. The road in that direction has been rough and challenging, but that has not stopped the dedicated advocates of reform from moving forward.

The authors of this NEJM Perspective on lessons from the Netherlands – Kieke G.H. Okma, Ph.D., Theodore R. Marmor, Ph.D., and Jonathan Oberlander, Ph.D. – are highly credible authorities on comparative studies and the politics of health care reform. The facts they present are well documented, and the conclusion is so obvious that it is essentially a restatement of the facts: “Systemwide regulation of spending, rather than competition among insurers, is the key to controlling health care costs.”

A well functioning health care system removes barriers to the care that patients need. It is sad commentary that the United States has a program for the most needy that instead crates a barrier to care. As this study shows, merely being covered by Medicaid disqualifies many children from being able to access the specialized care that they need.

Barbara Starfield made a difference. The momentum she created is so intense that it cannot be broken, but will carry us forward until we finally bring to reality our dream of a high-performance health care system based on a patient-oriented primary care infrastructure. We’ll all be better off for her efforts.