Letter to the Editor
New York Times Magazine
April 15, 2007
Is this what our country has come to? Leading C.E.O.’s, despairing of their ability to limit rising health-care costs and unwilling to bear these costs themselves any longer, will now back legislation that would place every individual and family at the mercy of private insurance companies like UnitedHealth, Wellpoint and the other insurance giants. Do they think John and Jane Doe can achieve what Safeway and General Motors cannot, namely, affordable health care for all of us?
Instead of moving backward to the time before there was employer-based or group health insurance, when people were on their own to get health care any way they could, we should be moving forward, recognizing that health care is a necessary public good that should be treated as a public responsibility. We should be expanding and improving the Medicare program, which we know provides reliable, cost-effective coverage and has been doing so for more than 40 years. Public Medicare-for-All, not private for-profit insurance, is the only path to a future that will truly provide access to health care for all Americans.
Oliver Fein, M.D.
New York
Leonard Rodberg
Flushing, N.Y.
(The authors are, respectively, chairman and research director of the New York chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program)