Single-Payer System Means Medical Serfdom

* Wake up, Valley medical professionals: One of your colleagues is touting medical serfdom as a glorious future.

Dr. Melvin H. Kirschner (Valley Commentary, Feb. 27) trumpets government-monopoly medicine--or, as he puts it, a single-payer system--as the solution to the incompetence of the government-controlled insurance cartel.

The medical system is a maze of paper pushers because socialistic intervention in the economy requires a bureaucracy. Nationalization of medicine will drive the best out of the medical field, ruin pharmaceutical research and endanger patients with rationed treatments. Putting government in charge of the system will turn medical professionals into slaves of the state.

Medicine is on the brink of becoming a giant postal service.

SCOTT HOLLERAN

Glendale