The American Spectator : Humane Health Care

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Humane Health Care

By Robert M. Goldberg on 2.20.09 @ 6:05AM

Ten ways to resist the single-payer fixes that our new leader has in store for us.

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Pipes concludes her book with potential solutions for our health care problems. She points out that most regulations governing health care are designed to protect a system with a "disconnect between provider and consumer." She proposes that individuals be free to shop for insurance across state lines, thus injecting a hefty dose of competition into the insurance market.

Pipes also argues that the tax breaks on health care enjoyed by corporations should be extended to individual consumers. As she notes, the current system guarantees that "people wind up with coverage that's in their employer's best interest, not theirs."

The U.S. health system is broken. President Obama promises to fix it. With her new book, Pipes has provided his administration with an admirable toolkit.

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topics:
Health Care

About the Author

Robert M. Goldberg is vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and founder of Hands Off My H ealth, a grass roots health care empowerment network. His is new book, Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used To Hijack Medical Science For Fear and Profit, was published last month by Kaplan.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (9) | Leave a comment

rr| 2.20.09 @ 10:52AM

Seniors, the disabled, and the chroniclly ill should be the ones out front to fight democratic efforts to socialize medicine. They will be the first to suffer and will suffer the most by being denied care and medicine in order to cut system costs. It is that way in all socialized medicine countries and cannot be different here.

Dustoff| 2.20.09 @ 11:43AM

This is already happening in EU.
They are reaching the point where the old cost to much and pulling back on their needed healthcare.

Just look at own medicare mess.

JN| 2.20.09 @ 1:44PM

The real issue here is who deserves access to healthcare. We have to face it, people. Not everyone deserves healthcare. If you are unable to scrape together the measly premiums, why should I subsidize your life with my hard-earned tax dollars? The communist Democrats and the AARP keep propping up the Stalinist Medicare bureaucracy, and it makes me angry. When are Americans going to wake up?

Earl Anderson| 2.20.09 @ 6:18PM

Premiums would not be nearly as high if we were allowed to purchase basic policies instead of these state mandated policies that contain coverage for everything but the kitchen sink. Let there be a true free market so that you pick a la carte the things you need in a policy and pay only for that level of coverage.

Donald Sammis| 2.20.09 @ 7:53PM

Why does Pingback continue to clutter up these blogs?

charliebravo| 2.21.09 @ 8:33AM

It sad that proposals like shopping across state lines, tax deductions for individual policies were never pushed by George W Bush. His Inability to communicate was a real loss. Sadly it is too late for this now. The Republicans have ceded this issue to the Dems.

TJK| 2.21.09 @ 1:24PM

And it may not even Obama's call to scrap the private insurance system. Drunken Ted has a reform act that will likely be passed just because it's Ted's bill. One question he needs to ask himself is, would he even still be alive if we had a single payer system? Probably not. Our health care system seems to be working just fine for him. As for the uninsured, how many illegals are being counted in that 40 or so million? Remove them from the calculation and the number is much more managable. Most estimates are that there 12 million illegals in the US. Add to them the number of those who choose not to purchase insurance, either privately or through their employer, and now we are dealing with less than 20 million uninsured people. We don't have to scrap the system for that 20 million. What we need are sensible solutions from pargmatic thinkers. Sadly, none of them are Democrats.