Health dollars wasted

By William Babson Jr., M.D.
Bangor (Maine) Daily News, Letters, Sept. 11, 2014

A recent study of the hospital costs in eight different nations published in the September issue of Health Affairs has determined that hospital costs in the U.S. in 2011 were much greater than those in all of the nations studied. Lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at the CUNY/Hunter College School of Public Health and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, stated, “We are squandering $150 billion each year on hospital bureaucracy and $300 billion is wasted every year on insurance companies’ overhead and the paperwork they inflict on doctors.” And our length of life and other parameters of the U.S. health care system are not as good as the seven other countries and many millions of Americans still have no or very limited insurance.

The evidence for a single payer health care system is getting stronger every day. We Americans simply have to become educated about why and how a single payer system works. Imagine that 450 billion of our “health care” dollars are spent needlessly and not on health care.

Dr. William Babson Jr. resides in Sinclair.

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014: Hunger, health care, bears, domestic violence