Healthcare on the critical list

Re “Health Plan to Revive Debate,” Jan. 23

The problem with healthcare in the United States isn’t that Americans are over-insured -- as claimed by many conservatives -- but that private health insurers take up to 30% as administrative costs. Compare this with administrative costs of 2% for Medicare. America spends more on healthcare than any other country and doesn’t have results to show for it, as measured by leading health indicators as diverse as infant mortality and the number of uninsured people.

Healthcare is not a product that most people can compare and purchase, as one would a television or cellphone-service provider. Allowing people to save money from their personal health savings accounts by forgoing a clinic appointment, for example, will result in larger problems down the line, driving up costs and resulting in worse health outcomes.

Clearly, as people more knowledgeable than myself have proposed, the answer to the growing U.S. healthcare problem is universal single-payer coverage. The private insurance route is clearly not working. President Bush proposes more of the same.

ARMAN AFAGH MD

Riverside

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If health savings accounts and partial privatization of Social Security are such good ideas, Mr. Bush, why not make members of Congress and the executive branch pay for health insurance and defined-benefits pensions and live like the majority of American workers?

PHIL GENINO

Alhambra

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Given the snafus that Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress made with the Medicare drug policy, the war in Iraq and the Katrina response, how do they expect us to trust them to fix healthcare?

JOAN MEIJER

Los Angeles

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First the president funnels untold billions of tax dollars to big pharmaceutical companies by way of his now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t prescription drug plan. Now he expects us to sit still while he does the same with the rest of healthcare. What is this, no special interest left behind? When are people going to wake up to the fact that his goal is to privatize the whole country? The last time we were set up that way, Americans were dying in the streets and on farms of disease and starvation. His “ownership society” is nothing more than code for every man (and woman and child) for himself. It will leave us with just two classes: the very rich and the very poor.

RANDAL SNYDER

Los Angeles