A Solution to America’s Health Care Crisis: Curing Our Sick Health Care System
By Robert Gumbiner, M.D., with Alis Gumbiner
I am proposing the federal government as the single payer of health care in this country. Only the federal government has the ability to fund one large risk pool through a payroll deduction. As the single payer, the federal government could negotiate hospital and physician payments even more effectively than it does now with Medicare. In addition, the federal government could negotiate prices for prescription drugs.
A single pool of funds, collected and administered by the government, would expand Medicare and replace Medicaid, SCHIP, the Veteran’s Administration, and private health insurance, including the health care aspect of Worker’s Compensation Insurance. Also eliminated would be the tax credit – or subsidy – given to companies for providing private health insurance to their employees. In other words, the current, inefficient patchwork of payment systems would disappear, to be replaced by one nationwide program available to every citizen.
http://www.healthcarecure.org/
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
What is remarkable about this quote in support of single payer is its source: Robert Gumbiner was the founder of FHP, one of the nation’s largest managed care companies.
Dr. Gumbiner received fame (some might say infamy) for his innovations in developing systems that controlled health care costs. In his book, he describes his successes and failures, and his evolving thoughts about how to best address the problem of affordability, currently the nation’s leading concern about health care. His bottom line is that we must enact a national single payer program, and that conclusion is coming from a manager’s perspective.