By Dave Dvorak, MD
Minnesota Medicine, February 7, 2014
I enjoyed the provocative predictions by Minnesota physicians regarding the future of medicine in your excellent December 2013 feature “A Look into the Future”.
May I respectfully add one more prediction? We finally will confront the elephant in the exam room – that the American health care “system” is actually a complicated and inefficient patchwork that squanders 31 percent of our health dollars on administration. We will recognize that the highly profitable and duplicative private insurance industry has proven a perennial failure, both in containing costs and in achieving anything resembling universal coverage.
We will adopt the streamlined efficiencies of a single-payer system to finally bring costs under control, achieve fair and comprehensive risk pooling, and most importantly, guarantee quality coverage for all citizens.