Medical Journal Urges Caps on Health Spending

The New England Journal of Medicine, calling health care costs the “black hole of our economy,” said the free market had created a non-system and threw its support behind global spending caps and an end to price competition.

The journal proposed “a Canadian-style single-payer system to fund the delivery of health care,” which it argued would be more efficient than the Administration goal of managed competition.

“Clearly, our system is peculiarly inefficient and inflationary,” Executive Editor Marcia Angell said in an editorial in today’s edition of the influential medical weekly.

The projected U.S. per capita health care cost for 1993 is $3,380--45% more than in Canada and more than 2.5 times that of Britain.

Angell said a spending cap should be set by Congress as a fraction of the gross domestic product. A single-payer system would cut administrative costs and prevent expenses from being shifted unfairly, she said.