By Teryl Zarnow
The Orange County Register, August 19, 2012
(Dr. Don) McCanne, now 74, volunteers as a policy fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program, where he was a past president. His group favors a single-payer national health program often called “Improved Medicare for All.”
It’s not socialized medicine, just socialized insurance.
I can’t decide if the doctor is out of touch with reality or a prophet in blue jeans.
Link for full article:
http://www.ocregister.com/news/-183873-ocprint–.html
And…
Health care cure is an Rx for economic ruin
The Orange County Register
August 25, 2012
NEWPORT COAST, Anita Boyd:
Columnist Teryl Zarnow failed to do her homework. “First, do no harm; second, nationalize” [Aug. 19] would be better titled, “No choice for patients.” What was presented as a “news” article was a one-sided promotional piece for socialized medicine.
Perusing the online mission statement of “Physicians for a National Health Care Program,” one notes that “the program should be financed by truly progressive taxation,” and “views this campaign as part of the campaign for social justice in the United States.” Among its allied groups are All Unions Committee for Single Payer Healthcare, Progressive Democrats of America, and Healthcare-NOW!
The leadership, membership and network are particularly illustrative of those wishing to “change” America, including Kim Gandy and Terry O’Neill, past and present presidents of NOW, respectively; Medea Benjamin of Code Pink San Francisco. The California Nurses Association participates to “provide leadership in winning organized labor support for HR676,” which is the single-payer bill sponsored by John Conyers, D-Mich., in the House of Representatives.
The smiling Dr. Don McCanne and his cadre of liberal progressives speciously suggest that the “cure” for health care in America is another entitlement to be paid for through the income tax system, as if this country is not already $16 trillion in debt (not counting unfunded liabilities.) The state of our entitlement system is completely ignored: Social Security is operating in the red with more funds flowing out than in for the first time in our nation’s history, propped up by a “trust fund” consisting of IOU’s from the Treasury. Medicare will follow that scenario sooner, rather than later, now that Obamacare has siphoned $716 billion in funding from Medicare over the next 10 years. All of this while Dr. McCanne proposes to place yet another burden on the barely 50 percent of Americans who pay taxes, mostly to be borne on the backs of the middle class, for that is where one finds the real wealth of this country. McCanne’s “cure” for health care is a prescription for the financial collapse of this country.
Using Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman’s logic, a medical system that provides the best quality to the most must necessarily embrace free-market principles, but the free market is absent in our health care industry today. In 1945 Congress passed the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which exempted the business of medical insurance from federal antitrust laws.
Thus insurance companies may freely conspire to price-fix without legal repercussion, and consumers cannot readily compare prices for products and services. Coupled with expensive and unnecessary tests defensively prescribed to ward off meritless malpractice suits, our system is certainly sick, but it is not incurable. Just as the computer evolved from a slow, clunky but pricey desktop to a sleek, fast laptop at less than one-fourth the price of the original 30 years ago, competition and innovation can bring down the cost of health care, improve quality and enhance affordability. A free-market prescription begins with the embrace of free-market principles: repealing McCarran-Ferguson, posting prices for services and products, competition across state lines, tort reform and empowering the consumer.
The inevitable result of McCanne’s alternative is all too evident in the United Kingdom’s single-payer system, where months-long waits for simple surgeries are commonplace, and breast cancer patients were denied the use of life-saving Tamoxifen until public outrage became so loud that the government caved. How many lives were lost before this concession? There was no choice for patients under this plan. There will be none under Dr. McCanne’s.
http://letters.ocregister.com/2012/08/25/health-care-cure-is-an-rx-for-economic-ruin/
And…
How the U.S. should fix health care
The Orange County Register
September 5, 2012
SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Don McCanne, M.D., Senior Health Policy Fellow, Physicians for a National Health Program:
Letter-writer Anita Boyd [“Health care cure is an Rx for economic ruin,” Aug, 23], in responding to Teryl Zarnow’s column on me and my advocacy for single-payer reform [“First, do no harm; second, nationalize,” Aug. 19], stated, “Using Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman’s logic, a medical system that provides the best quality to the most must necessarily embrace free-market principles, but the free market is absent in our health-care industry today.”
She then proposes a “free-market prescription.” In doing so, she ignores Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow’s seminal work of a half century ago demonstrating that health care fails competitive market preconditions, and “when the market fails to achieve an optimal state, society will, to some extent at least, recognize the gap and nonmarket social institutions will arise attempting to bridge it.”
In 2004, I was on a panel debate with Milton Friedman discussing prescription drugs. In that debate he said, regarding the government’s defense of patents, “My initial reaction was to say, of course we want to let the market completely work, and instead of having the government defend the patent, let the patent owner defend it. But the more you look at it, the more you see that’s inconsistent.” He also acknowledged the importance of government in drug research. Even in Friedman’s view, pure free markets are an illusion.
Further, the oracle of free markets, Noble Laureate Friedrich A. Hayek, in “The Road to Serfdom,” wrote, “There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, (the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance) should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”
Every other wealthy nation provides comprehensive health care to virtually everyone, and they do it at a per person cost that averages close to half of what we spend. The secret is that they all use some form of social insurance, acknowledging the fact that health care markets inevitably fail for far too many with significant health care needs.
The Affordable Care Act of President Barack Obama supposedly relies on market principles by expanding competition of private health plans. Under the act, 30 million people will remain uninsured, inadequate health plans with low actuarial values will become the new standard and costs will continue to increase out of control. This is the most expensive of all possible models of health care reform, and yet falls miserably short of achieving a high-performance system. It is a mistake to pretend that marke
ts will work since free markets do not and cannot possibly ever exist in health care, as the current reform effort once again demonstrates.
As Herbert Stein would say, the current status cannot continue. It is absolutely inevitable that eventually we will enact some form of social insurance. Although there are several possible models, the most likely for the United States will be our popular Medicare program, in an improved version. It would cover everyone. It would rely on progressive taxes to make it affordable based on ability to pay. It would improve efficiency, especially by eliminating the profound administrative waste that characterizes our current, fragmented, dysfunctional financing system. It would remove private insurer intrusions, returning choice in actual health care to the patient. Though a public social insurance program, it would perpetuate our private health care delivery system (i.e., it is not socialized medicine). Especially important is that it would exercise its purchasing power as a public monopsony, finally bending the cost curve to sustainable levels.
Much of the debate today includes distortions and exaggerations, driven by ideology. In this information age, the true facts are readily available. Instead of chasing after the ever-elusive fantasy of free markets in health care, we should join together in supporting the crafting of a bona fide social insurance program that works for all of us, based on solid health policy science.
http://letters.ocregister.com/2012/09/05/how-the-u-s-should-fix-health-care/