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Time for a change?: Health care system due for an overhaul, many say

Miller, Sandy

2007

Overview

Dr. Rod Kack, a local ear, nose and throat doctor, says the problems all started about three decades ago when medicine ceased being an art and became a business. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and other insurance companies replaced doctors as the decision makers. Kack believes there needs to be a big change in health care, but he stops short of advocating a single-payer national health insurance system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, while delivery of care remains largely private. They're not booing so much anymore. In fact, a number of physicians across the U.S. have banded together and formed Physicians for a National Health Program. According to the organization's Web site, the reason the U.S. spends more and gets less on health care than other industrialized nations is because the U.S. has a \"patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: Overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay.\" In turn, doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. PNHP estimates that all this administration consumes a third of Americans' health dollars.

• Publisher: Tribune Content Agency LLC
• Subject: Health care policy / Health insurance / Hospitals / Industrialized nations / Insurance policies / Kack, Rod / Kee, John / Physicians