Samuelson's Got It Backwards: Health Care Plans Should Alleviate Pain

Robert J. Samuelson got his basic economic principles and his humanity wrong in Rx for Health Care: Pain, op-ed December 6, 2007. He contends that providing health care for the 47 million uninsured Americans means we aren't serious about reigning in costs—our true health care problem. But that's economic nonsense—it's the first step. A simple cost saving measure is getting the insurance companies out of health care. This saves their 30% administrative costs, much of which the insurance companies use to deny care to sick people. So, a universal health plan where every American belongs and gets care when they need it helps us in three important ways. We save money. We get more and better care. And, we create a means to address Samuelson's concern: we have a large health care provider with both the interest and the muscle to negotiate lower costs for medicines and services. Doing what's right—providing care for all Americans—saves us money and makes us healthier. That's the basic health care model for essentially every other industrialized country in the world, where their people get better care for less money than we do. It can work here, too. For heaven's sake, aren't sick people in enough pain already?

Eric Haas
Senior Fellow