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Quotes on Health Care Reform |
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Authors' Quotes on Health Insurance and Reform
For better or worse, the "free" market will remain our nation's choice for funding health insurance and delivering medical care.
Our only hope of fixing the health care system's biggest problems is to
enact simple legislative reforms designed with one purpose: to allow
the market to provide health insurance more efficiently and
affordably. This is a significant and somewhat painful conclusion for
the same author who wrote a book as recently as 1998 arguing that
managed care would compel the market to reform itself.
- Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System by J.D. Kleinke
- Available on Amazon.com
In the absence of a sufficiently independent and militant working-class movement, national health insurance continued to be defeated in the decades that followed. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the AMA
carried on its vehement opposition to any federal intervention into the
financing of medical care. Liberal reformers tried to get national health insurance
included in the Social Security Act as part of the New Deal response to
the Great Depression and the militant organizing among the unemployed
and industrial workers.
- Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown
- Available on Amazon.com
The traditional opponents of comprehensive change such as national health insurance have been the AMA, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and certain other business interests. After the reform
debacle of 1994, politicians looked at comprehensive change with the
deference owed a third rail. Popular wisdom dictated that the only
politically safe route to take in efforts at health care reform
was the path of "incremental" change. What have the incremental efforts
of the past decade brought us? We've seen an increase of about five
million in the number of uninsured.
- Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System by Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
- Available on Amazon.com
After the war commercial insurance companies, following the Blue Cross lead, pushed energetically into the health insurance market they had previously all but ignored. Blue Cross and commercial health insurance
companies developed this new commodity into a major industry --
totaling $39 billion in premium income in 1977-and strengthened
hospitals' finances and their position in the medical delivery system.
The groups that had coalesced around the Committee on the Costs of
Medical Care pressed on with their campaign to reform medical care.
- Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America by E. Richard Brown
- Available on Amazon.com
With a standardized plan design and the consumer mobility created by tax parity, health insurance
customers like Mary are free to choose whatever insurer they want: the
one with the best customer service, the one with the fewest utilization
review hurdles, the one with the most heartwarming TV ads. Mary's
money, her medical care, her choice. The consumer behavior consequences
of this tax code reform would mirror one of the goals of the AMA's reform plan, with its own proposal of tax parity.
- Oxymorons: The Myth of a U.S. Health Care System by J.D. Kleinke
- Available on Amazon.com
The burgeoning debate about health care reform and possible nationalization of health insurance
coverage are bringing these underlying issues to light. Key questions
will be forced to the surface: Why are we so sick? Why does medical
care cost so much? Are there cheaper, more effective alternatives? One
of this book's intentions is to provide a therapeutic and philosophical
rationale for the optimistic "yes" to these questions.
- Physician: Medicine and the Unsuspected Battle for Human Freedom by Richard Leviton
- Available on Amazon.com
Yet there is a very strong ethic, expressed mostly by conservative, but also some mainstream, religious elements in America, which clearly is in direct opposition to the concepts of universal coverage and national health insurance. This ethic colors how many Americans look at the issue of health care reform.
It arises largely out of the oft-repeated mantra for "personal
responsibility," the same mantra that keeps alive the demand for
deductibles and/or co-pays.
- Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System by Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
- Available on Amazon.com
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Quotes
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