Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center have a hissy fit, Anthem walks away, and the children suffer.

PNHP’s model of a single payer national health program would eliminate the role of passive investors in health care since the interests of private investors must always prevail over the interests of patients – an untenable situation which makes health care expensive, inefficient and inequitable. Rather than shunning the for-profit model, we are now bringing the profit motive to our medical schools.

Robert Kaplan and Michael Porter are correct when they say that we need to understand costs rather than prices if we are to improve value in our health care spending. But is their approach on analyzing our costs an efficient method that can be applied throughout our health care system?

Supporters of a single payer national health program often refer to the model as “Improved Medicare for All.” This report demonstrates one of the more important reasons why we say that it needs to be improved. Medicare provides less value than the typical large employer PPO plan or the FEHBP Standard Option (the federal employees’ plan).

Buck Consultants has completed a survey of insurers and administrators showing that each and every form of employer-provided health plan is projecting cost increases of 9.9 percent. Is it a mere coincidence that all of these increases are just below the 10 percent threshold for subjecting insurance premium rate increases to federal government review?

This widely-reported study suggests that the high costs for cancer care in the United States are well worth it, providing $800 billion in the value of additional survival gain for prostate and breast cancers alone. A critical review of this study casts great doubt on this conclusion.

Primarily because of conflict of interest considerations, physician-owned specialty hospitals, such as the cardiac specialty hospitals reported in this study, have remained controversial.

Why on earth would a single payer advocate grant so much space on health care reform to prominent conservatives, allowing them to frame the problems in a manner that supports their specific policy recommendations? By better understanding their framing and the flawed policies that flow from that, we can explain to the nation why they are so terribly wrong, and why the policies of a single payer national health program are an imperative.

Within the mainstream media there is hardly an article on politics that doesn’t make some effort to present “both sides” of the issue, often settling on reporting suggesting that “centrist” views best represent an application of the facts. Where does single payer fit in this?

The Barack Obama whom we had hoped was elected as president, on the topic of health care coverage, once again has stated clearly, “One way is a single-payer plan. Everybody is a under a single system, like Medicare,” whereas “The other way is to set up a system in which you don’t have people who are healthy but don’t bother to get health insurance, and then we all have to pay for them in the emergency room. That doesn’t work, and so as a consequence, we’ve got to make sure that those folks are taking their responsibility seriously, which is what the individual mandate does.”