Medical Insurance

I continue to be amazed by the naivete and palpable wrongheadedness of your ivory-tower economists, Martin and Kathleen Feldstein. It appears these people have never been hospitalized or had an operation or been sent for a lab work-up, etc. They state, “People have no incentive to question the cost of care and no incentive to compare costs of different treatments at different hospitals.” Ye gads! Who, other than the doctor-as-patient, has the smarts or the guts to question his care and treatment? Your doctor diagnoses your problem, he orders the lab tests, he puts you in a hospital where he is accredited, he orders your medication and post-hospital prescriptions, etc. No patient has any control over these elements of medical costs. The patient’s only “control,” tenuous at best, is to get a second opinion if he/she doesn’t like what the first physician has diagnosed or prescribed.

The Feldsteins just can’t see that it is the doctors, the hospitals, the laboratories and the pharmaceutical companies that are inflating the costs of care, if not actually ripping off the public and the government to a fare-thee-well.

The sooner we get a “Canadian-type” national health plan, the better off we’ll all be.

ROBERT E. GREEN

Sherman Oaks