From the Inbox
In reference to CFR.org’s Backgrounder, “Health Care Costs and U.S. Competitiveness,” reader Stephen Keister writes:
I, by-and-large, subscribe to the author’s presentation. As an 86-year-old, retired physician, I am sad to watch the progressive deterioration of the American “health care system” over the past 30 years. I find it unimaginable that the system in which I once worked now ranks 26th among nations for health care delivery. Ours is the only system, among enlightened countries, which is run primarily for the profit of the insurance industry rather than the care of the ill and the disabled. Ours is the only nation in which one can be denied medical care at the whim of a representative of an insurance carrier. Ours is the only nation in which care can be denied due to “pre-existing conditions, real or contrived.We have a system lacking in compassion and empathy. We live in a country where the insurance companies will spend millions to propagandize the ill informed public about the dangers of “socialized medicine.” A meaningless term, which when asked the average person can define save for the fact that it is something terrible! Matter of fact we have two good examples of “socialized medicine”, i.e. Medicare and the currently underfunded V.A. System.
Medicine should not be held hostage by the political establishment or the insurance industry. There is a recourse, a plan developed over the past 20 years by 15,000 physicians. Please review and liaison with Physicians For A National Health Care Plan. American medicine can be brought up to western world standards. We need a single payer, universal plan, administered by a public insurance agency.–Stephen R. Keister, M.D.
