BY ERIC COOK
Kalamazoo Gazette
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
KALAMAZOO — Insurance-company profits and increases in administrative staff have helped push up the cost of health care so steeply over the years that many Americans can’t afford coverage, a proponent of health-care change said Tuesday in Kalamazoo.
Dr. James C. Mitchiner said single-payer health insurance can greatly reduce health care costs by removing the profits and broadening the risk pool. Mitchiner is an emergency-room physician at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor and president-elect of the Washtenaw County Medical Society.
“By broadening the risk pool, you have more healthy people paying for the sick, and less support staff is required,” said Mitchiner, speaking Tuesday evening during a forum titled “Single Payer Health Insurance: What It Is, What It Isn’t and Why We Need It.” Sponsored by the WMU Center for the Study of Ethics in Society, the free event was held in the Fetzer Center’s Putney Auditorium.
Mitchiner advocated a single-payer health-care system funded by the federal government but not owned or controlled by it.
“This isn’t socialized medicine,” said Mitchiner, who serves on the
Michigan State Medical Society Committee on Health Care Quality, Efficiency and Economics. “It is just simply health care that is financed publicly with private delivery.”
Instead of relying on insurance companies with dozens of claims departments, the health-care system would use a single company that would have much lower administrative costs, Mitchiner said.
He described a health-care plan similar to the governmentally funded health-care system in Canada and said it could easily be implemented by the American government.
“We already have a plan similar to this in place which covers a large amount of Americans successfully — Medicare,” he said.
The key to successfully implementing the program would be to do so gradually, he said.
“We would start the program by covering children and then slowly raise the age in which we cover them from 16 to 18 to 21 while simultaneously lowering the eligibility age of Medicare,” Mitchiner said.
Private health insurance would still be available, he said.
“The program would make sure everyone was covered in an essential-benefits package, but people would still use insurance companies for supplemental insurance,” Mitchiner said. People would have the option of buying additional insurance, as they do now in Medicare, he said.