Now Playing: Healthcare is not an American resource best served by profit-seeking
Topic: Health & Science
Why we ever let insurance companies turn our national personal health into an asset of profits is beyond me. Even if we had no vision, surely we could have and should have done something long before this.
Insurance companies may very well be the biggest crooks and liars in the nation - certainly the biggest lying and crooking segment of our corporate capitalist fraud.
Excerpt from The Boston Globe via Common Dreams.org
Health Reform Failure
Health reform built on private insurance isn’t working and can’t work; it costs too much and delivers too little.
At present, bureaucracy consumes 31 percent of each healthcare dollar. The Connector - the new state agency created to broker coverage under the reform law - is adding another 4.5 percent to the already sky-high overhead charged by private insurers.
Administrative costs at Blue Cross are nearly five times higher than Medicare’s and 11 times those in Canada’s single payer system. Single payer reform could save $7.7 billion annually on paperwork and insurance profits in Massachusetts, enough to cover all of the uninsured and to upgrade coverage for the rest of us.
Of course, single payer reform is anathema to the health insurance industry. But breaking their stranglehold on our health system and our politicians is the only way for health reform to get beyond square one.
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program and are primary care doctors at Cambridge Hospital.
