Letter to the Editor
St. Petersburg Times
Friday, June 26, 2009
Re: What health reform must do | June 21, editorial
The three guiding principles espoused in your editorial are certainly laudable, but our current direction toward health care “reform” will not, unfortunately for the American people, make any of them come to pass.
Universal coverage is essential to any true reform, but the current plans being debated in Congress fall woefully short of that goal. As you note, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that current plans in the Senate come with a price tag of $1 trillion over the next 10 years, while still leaving 36 million without any coverage.
We already spend enough to insure everyone right now and it’s 2 1/2 times what the average industrialized country spends. To pump additional monies into a system that over the last 50 years has proven itself wasteful, expensive, complicated and which produces poorer health outcomes than other countries is as absurd as it is reckless.
Medical cost increases dramatically outpace inflation and wages year after year. The only way we will ever control these costs is to utilize the purchasing power of the federal government to negotiate with suppliers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors and hospitals on behalf of all taxpayers and demand quality, efficiency and effectiveness for our health care dollars.
We currently lose more than 30 percent of each dollar spent for private insurance companies’ overhead, profits and bonuses. That’s $600 billion annually that should be spent on providing health care. The current plans look to cutting Medicare and Medicaid funding and taxing the health benefits of workers to pay for more private plans. Those “solutions” can only exacerbate the current problems and inequities in our system.
I agree that we need to build on what works in our current system, but that is not private insurance. It’s Medicare, a program that already provides care to more than 44 million seniors with higher satisfaction ratings than employer-sponsored private insurance plans. Medicare enrollees have more choice of doctors and hospitals than those in “network” limited private plans. And with only a 3 percent overhead, the savings of a “Medicare for All” program would be more than enough to cover all of the uninsured without any additional benefit cuts or spending.
Greg M. Silver, M.D., Clearwater