Single-Payer Plan Is Needed for Health Care
* Dr. Melvin Kirschner’s commentary “ ‘Managed Care’ Takes Decisions Out of the Doctor’s Hands” (May 8) is right on the mark.
Insurance companies have set up a huge new bureaucracy of managers between patients and their doctors. This bureaucracy is not only costly, it removes decision-making from the doctors’ hands while limiting a patient’s freedom of choice.
Kirschner stops short of recommending what many doctors and patients are recognizing as the best solution to our health care crisis: the single-payer plan. With this plan, doctors remain in private practice and patients have complete freedom to choose their provider. Everyone is insured and has the same comprehensive benefits plan. The insurance companies and their myriad different plans, forms and bureaucrats are eliminated.
The government is “the single payer,” paying everyone’s health care costs from tax revenues. Yes, taxes go up, but health insurance premiums are eliminated, and most people would save money. Health care costs are controlled because fair costs are negotiated between the government and health care providers.
Polls show that a majority of Americans favor the single-payer plan, which insurance companies are spending millions of our health insurance premium dollars to defeat in Congress.
WILLIAM F. SKEEN
Studio City
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