The Costs of a Trip to the Doctor

By Winthrop Dillaway, M.D.
The New York Times, Letters, Jan. 21, 2014

Re “Patients’ Costs Skyrocket; Specialists’ Incomes Soar” (“Paying Till It Hurts” series, front page, Jan. 19):

The American health care system fails irrefutably and unacceptably with its economics and its ethics. How is it acceptable that the other leading countries of the world provide universal health care at half the cost and generally with higher quality?

The increasing national recognition of single-payer (improved Medicare for all) offers a singular and simple solution to both the economics and the ethics of our health care system. Single payer is simple, economical and humane, and it is desperately needed in the United States.

The writer, a retired family medicine specialist, is New Jersey chapter president of Physicians for a National Health Program. He resides in Morristown, N.J.