The New York Times, published October 30, 2004

 

To the Editor:

The flu vaccine emergency is a dramatic example of our health care crisis. In Europe, there is no shortage because governments there take responsibility for the public’s health, by assuring universal health care coverage through national health insurance.
 
This responsibility for the health of the public also leads them to restrain drug prices through bulk buying or price controls, and to take prudent steps to ensure an adequate supply of necessary drugs.

We need to replace for-profit private health insurance companies with an improved Medicare-for-all program in which drug availability can be assured and prices can be controlled.

Oliver Fein, M.D.
Joanne Landy
New York, Oct. 26, 2004

The writers are, respectively, chairman and executive director, Physicians for a National Health Program, New York Metro chapter.

 

WHY THE U.S. NEEDS HEALTH CARE REFORM:
The Case of Influenza Vaccine
A Statement by
The NY Metro Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program
October 29, 2004

 

The current flu vaccine emergency is a dramatic example of the crisis of the profit-driven U.S. health care system, a system increasingly recognized as dysfunctional. In Europe, there is no flu vaccine shortage. (See “European Health Agencies, Using Many Vaccine Suppliers, Are Facing No Shortages” by Elizabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, Oct. 2004) That’s because European governments take responsibility for the public’s health: they assure that everyone has access to health care, either through some form of national health insurance or through a national health service. This responsibility for the public’s health also leads them to restrain drug prices, either through bulk buying or through price controls, and they take prudent steps to see that necessary drugs are in sufficient supply. In the case of the flu vaccine, such steps include measures like buying vaccines from multiple suppliers rather than being dependent on just one or two and, instead of leaving the production of vaccines to an unpredictable private market, guaranteeing the availability of necessary vaccines by assuring the manufacturers that the vaccines they produce will be purchased.

What is needed in this country is a national health insurance program in which drug availability can be assured and prices can be controlled as part of an overall health care and public health system, and in which maximizing profit is not an incentive for withholding access to health care services. Today, the cost of health care premiums is out of control. Forty-five million persons in the U.S. are uninsured for a full year, and an astounding 82 million people were without health insurance for all or part of 2002 and 2003. Persons without insurance are left to fend for themselves and must rely on charity and public assistance, or on the general public in the form of subsidies of emergency room facilities. Drug prices are uncontrolled and are the highest in the world.

As Donald Barlett and James Steele point out in their recent opinion piece in the New York Times (Oct. 24, 2004), the U.S. needs “a single-payer system that would eliminate the costly, inefficient bureaucracy generated by thousands of different plans. It’s not such a radical idea; a single-payer system already exists for Medicare.” Under Medicare public insurance, people are able to see the physician of their choice on a fee-for-service basis, and to go to virtually any hospital.

The current influenza vaccine debacle is only the latest of examples why the current system cannot be left to collapse of its own devices. It’s time to end the tyranny of the for-profit private insurance companies, whose goal is to insure the healthy and save money by covering the sick as little as possible, and replace them with a public agency. It’s also time to rein in the drug companies, as do other countries in the world. And it’s time for our government to take responsibility for ensuring that we have adequate supplies of good quality medication and immunizations for all who need them.

 

PHYSICIANS FOR A NATIONAL HEALTH PROGRAM-NY METRO CHAPTER, 2753 Broadway, #198, New York, NY 10025, Tel: 212 666-4001   Fax: 212 866-5847, Email: pnhpnyc@igc.org   Web: www.pnhpnyc.org

 

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