What are private insurers selling us? Their primary product is a network of health care providers that have contracted to accept the insurers’ rates. The benefit of that is that it has helped to slow the rate of increase in health insurance premiums. One major problem with that is individuals frequently obtain care from out-of-network providers – usually not by choice, but by medical circumstances not really under the control of the patient. Under most insurance plans, the individual then becomes responsible for payment of most or all of the out-of-network charges.

Obviously, giving someone who lives in Maine the choice of having the option for an expense-paid trip to California to receive health care is not one of the goals of health care reform. That’s not exactly what is meant by choice. This was an exaggeration on the part of the President to make the point that, of course, we can’t have choice.

For those of us in the United States who want to know more about the horrors of their government-run, socialist system of health care, Conservative David Cameron would be the first to expose how government ownership and management are a threat to the health of the people. But that is not his message.

Ethics meets economics not only at the end of life, but throughout a lifetime of health care. Economics provides us with various alternatives on financing health care, and ethics provides us with the decency to do it the right way.

Helen Thomas doesn’t ever give up, thank goodness. As she writes, President Obama “still has time to do the right thing.”

As we look at comprehensive health care reform, we really have to ask ourselves just what is it that the private insurance plans are providing us in exchange for their exorbitantly high administrative costs and the costly administrative burden they place on the health care delivery system?

We at Physicians for a National Health Program are terribly saddened to report the sudden and unexpected loss of one of our staff members, Nicholas Skala, who died over the weekend in his Chicago home at the age of 27 of unknown causes.

What a nice thing UnitedHealthcare is doing. Being dedicated to the health care consumer, they are helping their commercial plan enrollees manage their health-related finances and information through the Quicken Health Expense Tracker developed by Intuit jointly with their own Ingenix division. This is the industry’s solution for reducing the administrative complexity and waste of our fragmented, multi-payer system. Or is it?

Most progressive policy wonks observing the reform process taking place in Washington have been quite smug. As the battles take place over a public option, over taxing employer-sponsored plans, or over the eligibility thresholds for government subsidies, these wonks are complacent knowing that the really important reform taking place is the establishment of the Health Insurance Exchange. Or so they believe.

Marilyn never gave up, though she left us yesterday, August 3, 2009.