The New York Times
Letters to the Editor
Published: November 1, 2008
To the Editor:
“The Candidates’ Health Plans” (editorial, Oct. 28) reveals the critical flaw in both candidates’ proposals. Both merely redistribute the cost of health care; neither actually lowers the cost. Their common flaw: continued dependence on insurance companies.
Here’s a better plan: a single national nongovernment not-for-profit health insurance company financed by a payroll tax. By eliminating the profit margin and cost of marketing, we can reduce the cost of health insurance, and thus health care, dramatically.
Glenn Alan Cheney
Hanover, Conn., Oct. 28, 2008
To the Editor:
Your editorial accurately describes the candidates’ plans. But it doesn’t reveal how inadequate they are.
In the face of a doubling of health care costs just since 1999, they propose nothing that would seriously contain costs or assure access to health care for the millions of Americans, both insured and uninsured, who today are one illness away from bankruptcy.
These plans continue to rely on a privately run insurance system that has shown itself to be too costly, too inflation-prone and too unreliable to meet our needs. As a result, they fail to provide the major system overhaul that the American people need and have been demanding.
Only a complete restructuring of the way we pay for health care, toward a publicly financed system that can assure access to care — much as Medicare does today for those over 65 — while containing costs can truly provide the solid foundation we need for the health care system of the future.
Leonard Rodberg
New York, Oct. 28, 2008
The writer is research director of the New York metro chapter, Physicians for a National Health Program.
To the Editor:
No proposal for the delivery of health care in the United States will make a difference unless somewhere in the debate single payer (Medicare for all) figures in.
Americans must ask an important question: Who would be a more beneficent provider of health care, a well-financed nonprofit national program, or for-profit insurance companies whose primary responsibility is to shareholders and not patients?
Only through a government-sponsored Medicare-for-all model will every resident be guaranteed the basic health care that is the right of all of our citizens, privileged or not.
Richard L. Stivelman
Salisbury, Md., Oct. 28, 2008
The writer is a medical doctor.
To the Editor:
While Senator Barack Obama’s health care plan is certainly sounder than Senator John McCain’s, it is far from what it needs to be if the goal is for all Americans to have quality, affordable health care.
In order to achieve that, we would need single-payer national health insurance, like almost every other industrialized nation has.
Barack Obama used to support a single-payer system, in which health care is publicly financed but privately delivered, as it is in Medicare. Unfortunately, on the way to becoming mainstream enough for the presidency, he stopped talking about single payer and now proposes a system that would preserve the role of for-profit insurance companies, with their administrative excesses.
Mr. Obama should know that as long as private insurers are allowed to waste our premiums finding ways to deny care and deliver dividends to shareholders, universal health care in the United States will never happen.
Sarah Ramer
Pittsburgh, Oct. 28, 2008
The writer is a second-year medical student.