Healthcare debate

Re “Health reform goals sharpen,” Dec. 1

The Times’ front page article describes a consensus forming in favor of a universal healthcare system dominated by the private health insurance industry. Yet the article clearly indicates why a government-operated, single-payer, universal healthcare program is the better way to go.

The story notes that “the government will control costs and set standards of care, proposals that raise the unpopular prospect of federal regulators dictating which doctors Americans can see and what drugs they can take.”

The private, for-profit healthcare insurance industry is doing that to us now. As a private family-practice physician, I have found that Medicare is often kinder to the patient than private healthcare insurers are. There is one set of rules, the same for everybody, and nobody is rejected.

Melvin H.

Kirschner, MD

Granada Hills

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Your article states that “leading groups of businesses, hospitals, doctors, labor unions and insurance companies” are calling on the government to create a universal healthcare system. Who on that list speaks for me and the millions in this country who desperately need guaranteed healthcare?

Does anyone think that insurance companies are interested in anything except their profit margins?

The only sane answer to our problem is a single-payer system. But, no, your article states, the single-payer system is “off the table.” Who decided that? Why do the insurance companies deserve a place at the table while the rest of us scrounge around on the floor hoping that a few scraps fall for us?

Clyde Flowers

Long Beach

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The government should not be guaranteeing “universal healthcare.” Healthcare is a need, not a right. Rights are freedoms of action, not automatic claims on goods and services that must be produced by another. There’s no such thing as a “right” to a car or an appendectomy. Whenever the government attempts to guarantee a service such as healthcare, it must control it, leading to Canadian-style rationing and waiting lists.

Instead of universal healthcare, we need free-market reforms, such as allowing patients to purchase insurance across state lines and use health savings accounts for routine expenses, and allowing insurers to sell inexpensive, catastrophic-only policies to cover rare but expensive events. Such reforms could reduce costs and make insurance available to millions who cannot currently afford it.

Paul Hsieh, MD

Sedalia, Colo.