Health Reform - Posted to New York Times Blog

(For those of you visiting from the the New York Times blog, there are other posts related to health care reform below).

As a veteran of the health insurance "cost containment" and “managed care” movements and a student of the health care "industry", I have seen from the inside the inefficiencies of the health payment system and the ineffective and bloated bureaucracies of Managed Care (on both the payer and provider sides of the equation)..

A single payer system (a world single payer would be the ideal), with regional administration units, would reduce health care costs by eliminating profit from the system, greatly reduce costs by eliminating marketing costs and by the streamlining of huge redundancies in administration systems. A single payer system would also allow for a capitated non-profit delivery system where Physicians could triage care unencumbered. But this is only a third of the picture.

A second third of the problem is the rampant abuse (perhaps much or some of it is well intentioned) and fraud associated with the profit driven medical industrial complex and the associated revenue and job security needs of the provider community.

Instituting a non-profit HMO system with careful medical protocols, could allow us to slowly, orderly, and healthily bring the leviathan costs associated with medical care delivery way down.

The third piece, and it is a huge one, is environmental and public health.

Thank you.