Search the News Archive

NYT Letter to the Editor: Invitation to a Dialogue on a National Health Plan

Health care reform could provide better care at less cost by replacing individual mandates with a single-payer national health care plan financed by taxes. Congress's power to mandate purchase of private products sold at a profit is disputable, but Congress's power to tax is not.

'National Health Care: Breeding Ground for Terror?'

Excerpt: '[Fox] News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism. While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

A Glimpse into America's Health Care Mess

Excerpt: The medical and insurance lobbies have been busy blocking national health care programs since they were first seriously proposed back in the 1920's -- and the result has been millions of premature deaths in this country because of people falling through the cracks. Doctors fighting universal coverage have been saving lives in their day jobs while costing lives with their lobbying.

What Is 'Socialized Medicine'?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems

Excerpt: With another 'national conversation' about health reform upon us -- as it is every decade or so -- we will hear a lot of derisive talk about the evils of 'socialized medicine.' The term is regularly confused with 'social health insurance,' which is not at all the same concept. The chart [followed by text explanations in the article] may be helpful in appreciating the distinction.

McCain's Radical Health Insurance Agenda

Excerpt: Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation's health insurance system? These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families. A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

Differences in Prices and Spending Under Medicare and Private Insurance

"[T]here is very little correlation between variation in Medicare spending on hospital services, which is primarily due to variation in the volume of services, and variation in private insurer spending, which is primarily due to varying effectiveness of insurer price negotiation that relates to the market power of hospitals as determined by their degree of market concentration.... Current policies are designed to cut back on use of health care services more than on prices.... But what we needed were policies to control high prices."

Why Does U.S. Health Care Cost So Much? - It Is not an Aging Population

Excerpt: [R]esearch around the world has shown that the process of the aging of the population by itself adds only a very small part -- usually about half a percentage point -- to the annual growth in per-capita health spending in industrialized societies, which tends to range between 5 and 8 percent, depending on the country and the period in question. The bulk of annual spending growth can be explained by overall population growth (about 1.1 percent per year), increases in the prices of health care goods and services, and the availability of ever more new, often high-cost medical products and treatments used by all age groups.

Single-Payer Insurance Puts More of the Money Spent Into the Health Care Delivered

Excerpt: The Senate Finance Committee has heard about the problem of overhead. On Nov. 19, Professor Uwe Reinhardt, who is also on the board of trustees of the 900-bed Duke University Hospital, used Duke to illustrate the problem: 'We have 900 billing clerks at Duke. I'm not sure we have a nurse per (each) bed, but we have a billing clerk per bed?it's obscene.' Two days later, the New York Times published his article: 'Why does U.S. Health Care Cost So Much? (Part II): Indefensible Administrative Costs.'

California's ABX1 1 -- Universal Health Insurance Without Health Care

Excerpt: The 'Health Care Security and Cost Reduction Act', also known as ABX1 1, and described by New York Times reporter Kevin Sack as a 'bipartisan blueprint' conceived by Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Assembly speaker Fabian Nunez to bring 'near-universal coverage to the country's most populous state', will neither provide health care security nor reduce costs of medical care. This article explains why.