Patient Connie Durkee gets her blood pressure checked by Lauri Snetsinger at The Health Center in Plainfield, Vt. Vermont decided to scuttle its single-payer health-care plans. (AP file)
Re: “If single-payer can’t work in Vermont …,” Dec. 26 Megan McArdle column.
Megan McArdle has it wrong. What Vermont recently scuttled wasn’t single-payer health care. Rather, it was multi-payer care (Vermontap Green Mountain Care, Medicare, the VA, Tricare, and numerous insurance companies covering Vermonters who work out-of-state). Such an arrangement could not achieve the cost savings of true (national) single-payer health care: single-source purchasing of pharmaceuticals, global budgeting for hospitals, and reduction of system overhead to Medicare levels (3 to 4 percent). Those economies can indeed be achieved; you just have to look north across the border for proof. Given these savings, the increased taxes needed to fund universal coverage would be largely offset by elimination of insurance premiums.
McArdle is right on one thing, however: Hordes of health-care administrators and pharmaceutical marketeers would be out of work under single-payer. But these buggy-whip positions serve no useful purpose and have to gradually go away if we are ever to move from the health care equivalent of horse-drawn to motorized transportation.
Louis Balizet, M.D., Pueblo
This letter was published in the Dec. 30 edition.
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