Doctors for Global Health will be holding its 16th Annual General Assembly from July 29th to the 31st at Loyola Marymount University in California. You can register now at: http://www.dghonline.org. The People’s Health Movement (PHM)/USA circle will be holding a pre-conference meeting in the days preceding the conference.
The theme of the Assembly is Community Action for Health and Social Justice: Health Begins Where We Work, Live, and Play. Here is a synopsis of the Program:
Keynote Speakers: America Bracho and Theresa & Blase Bonpane
Dr. America Bracho is the Executive Director of Latino Health Access a community health center in Orange County, California. She was the subject of a 2009 profile by Bill Moyers which discusses her work as a community organizer.
Theresa and Blase Bonpane are founders of Office of The Americas, an educational group dedicated to furthering the cause of justice and peace in the hemisphere. The Office sponsor a weekly radio program on KPFK (Los Angeles) called World Focus.
Panel discussions:
Health and Human Rights of Migrant Communities
Steven Wallace, PhD- UCLA Center for Health Policy Research
Kyrsten Sinema- Arizona State House of Representatives
DREAM Act students
Irma Cruz Nava, MD- CEPAFOS, Oaxaca, Mexico
Samaritans Patrol of Arizona
The Right to Food and Food Justice:
Anuradha Mittal- Executive Director of the Oakland Institute
Anje Van Berckelaer, MD- Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar
(others TBA)
Other activities:
Tour of Father Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Industries and Skid Row
Physicians for Social Responsibility discussion on nuclear technology
Update on People’s Health Movement-USA
Lively conversations, networking, socializing, and music
Updates from DGH partner communities in Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Burundi.
EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION PRIOR TO JUNE 1ST. SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE FOR STUDENTS AND ANYONE WITH NEED!
The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) was one of the most important groups of physician activists to emerge from the 1960′s. It was initially formed as the Medical Committee for Civil Rights and provided medical services for the 1963 March on Washington. In the 1964 the MCHR provided health services to organizers of the Freedom Summer voter registration campaigns. In the later 60′s the group took on a variety of social justice issues.
John Dittmer, author of The Good Doctors a history of the MCHR will be speaking at the monthly New York Physicians for a National Health Program meeting on Tuesday, April 26th at 7:30 PM. There will be a book signing and reception at 6PM. The event will take place at the Phillips Ambulatory Care Center at Beth Israel Medical Center, 10 Union Square East (btw 14th & 15th St), 2nd Fl.
While the lecture is free, a $25 donation is requested for the book signing.
We invite you to apply for the third annual Beyond the Biological Basis of Disease: The Social and Economic Causation of Illness, an on-site immersion course in social medicine offered at Lacor Hospital in Gulu, Uganda from January 9, 2012 through February 3, 2012. This intensive course designed for 15 international medical students (clinical years) and 15 Ugandan medical students (3rd-5th year) from Gulu University intersects the study of clinical medicine in a resource-poor setting with social medicine topics such as globalization, war, human rights, and narrative medicine, among others. This highly-interactive course is taught through a combination of lectures, small and large group discussions, films, community field visits, ward rounds, and clinical case discussions. Credit for away-rotations can be arranged.
For more information, we invite you to please see our website at: https://sites.google.com/site/socialmeduganda/. In addition, short videos of our previous courses can be viewed by clicking the desired year: 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHGpY4EDwg&feature=related and 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2UCUFcXAas.
If you have any questions or are interested in applying, please email us at social.medicine@yahoo.com. Applications are due July 31, 2011.
Sincerely,
Michael Westerhaus, MD, MA
Julian Jane Atim, MD, MPH
Amy Finnegan, MALD, MA
(course instructors)
As the world celebrates Women’s History Month, the U.S. House of Representatives has just launched the most devastating assault on women’s health in the history of our nation – a real case of state terrorism, or use of violence on a civilian population to achieve political goals.
If the House-passed bill is approved by the Senate and is signed into law by President Obama, Title X will be eliminated.
Title X provides basic health services, including Pap smears, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and cancer screenings to more than 5 million low-income people, disproportionately women, at a cost that is a fraction of the cost of waging at least two wars of aggression and funding over 700 overseas military bases and at least 6,000 such bases in the United States and its territories.
This bill would also cut $210 million from Maternal and Child Health Block Grants, that also serve poor women and children; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would see a major cut in its funding, of $755 million, that would undermine a host of public health efforts, such as confronting HIV/AIDS; and Community Health Centers would see a $1.3 billion dollar cut that would brutally curtail services in a network of health centers in cities and rural areas providing essential primary care — so much for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) expansion of funds for community clinics.
And it gets worse, and does not stop at our nation’s shores. The same legislation would also eliminate funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), the agency providing family planning, maternity care, and sexually transmitted diseases prevention services, among many other services essential to women’s wellbeing, in some 150 countries.
This onslaught against women joins the one against working people generally, as calls to “save” Social Security and Medicare by slashing these programs multiply, and an increasing number of state legislators attempt to gut the collective bargaining rights of unions with the spurious argument that public sector employees just “earn too much” and receive “too generous benefits”.
While the subtleties of the discourse differ, not only the right but also sectors of the “liberal left”, convey the same message: workers with “generous benefits” must give them up, because it is those “benefits” that caused “the deficit”.
But just what are these “generous benefits”?
The benefits of Wall Street we know well, even if they figure nowhere in these arguments. As President Obama noted (with a straight face) in this year’s State of the Union address, “the stock market has come roaring back and corporate profits are up.”
Yet the “benefits” of the US welfare state are paltry compared to those enjoyed by millions of individuals in similarly wealthy nations – in terms of public pensions, paid vacations, and maternity leave, to mention a few. And the United States stands alone in that it lacks guaranteed access to health care. The new federal law barely gave us an obligation to purchase an insurance policy from commercial insurers, under penalty of a fine, and would leave at least 23 million individuals (5% of the US population) with no coverage whatsoever ten years out of passing this law.
It would also leave a yet-to-be-estimated number of individuals burdened by medical bills that they cannot pay, as new “consumer–driven insurance products”, with actuarial values as low as 60%, huge co-pays, and deductibles, multiply.
As to the much trumpeted deficit, as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Institute reminds us, before the latest economic downturn the federal budget deficit was relatively modest – just over 1% of GDP in 2007, even with the cost of fighting two wars and Bush’s tax cuts (that anti-deficit crusaders remain blissfully silent about). The size of the deficit then certainly posed no danger to the economy.
But then everything collapsed, as an $8 trillion housing bubble burst, a bubble caused by the policies endorsed or even legislated by the same individuals that the Obama Administration has now asked for advice on how to “save” the economy – Pete Peterson, Alan Simpson, Erskin Bowles, among many others. So where were these anti-deficit crusaders between 2002 and 2006? They were, of course, crying wolf against…the deficit caused by the “generous benefits” of US workers.
And now, with 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, ten million underwater in their mortgages, over 50 million uninsured, and 45,000 dying every year for lack of access to basic medical care, these same economic geniuses are warning us against the “impending catastrophe” wrought by the “generous” salaries of public employees, the “Cadillac services” of minimally decent health insurance policies, programs providing basic health care to poor women, men, children and the elderly, Social Security, or Medicare.
Yet Social Security poses no major problem – it is projected to be fully solvent for almost 30 years with no changes whatsoever. Whichever problems it may have could be easily fixed by simply raising the cap on taxable income, a move that would affect only the wealthy. Medicare and other publicly financed healthcare programs pose a problem only because the US health care system, pre and post PPACA, is built upon a losing proposition: for-profit health insurance for medically necessary services.
It needn’t be this way. From the Middle East to the US Midwest ordinary people are demanding greater political participation and a share in the national wealth that they and only they overwhelmingly produce. As we commemorate those 15,000 brave women who back in 1908 marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights, American women and working Americans generally must demand no less.
Claudia Chaufan, M.D., Ph.D., is assistant professor at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. She teaches sociology of health and medicine, sociology of power, comparative health care systems and sociological theory. Dr. Chaufan is also vice president of Physicians for a National Health Program-California (http://pnhpcalifornia.org/).
On 24 December 2010 the court of Raipur, state capital of Chhattisgarh, India, rewarded the health and social justice life of pediatrician Dr. Binayak Sen not with honors, medals or an honorary degree, but with a sentence to life in prison.
The message from the Government of India: if you work as an advocate with the poor, you are against the government and will be punished severely. It is a message to any who would work toward a more just world, in accompaniment of the marginalized, stigmatized and poor.
Dr. Binayak Sen, who is vice-president of the Indian Human Rights organization PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberties) and is the recipient of the 2008 Jonathan Mann Global Health and Human Rights Award, was accused of transporting letters for a jailed Maoist leader who was under his medical care. Though the prosecution showed nothing but circumstantial evidence (better said, no evidence at all—all visits of Dr. Sen with the prisoner were attended by prison guards, none of whom saw any letters, and two of whom were declared “hostile” by the court when they testified that it would have been impossible for such an exchange of letters to happen), the judge ruled—using as the Lancet editorial (see below) notes “a section of the penal code first introduced by the British to quell political dissent and later used to convict Mahatma Gandhi”—that Dr. Binayak Sen is guilty of “sedition.”
Outrage at such treatment of a man many consider mentor, hero and teacher resounds globally in journals such as the Lancet (Lancet 377:98 on 8 January 2011, “Binayak Sen’s Conviction: A Mockery of Justice”) and British Medical Journal (BMJ 2010; 341:c7438 “Civil rights groups decry conviction of Indian paediatrician who pioneered community health”) and within the press in India.
Dr. Binayak Sen has worked for many decades with the poorest of the poor. He is well known as an advocate for health and social justice, an outspoken critic of police brutality. Apparently, his effectiveness is such that the Indian Government feels the need to silence him.
Go to http://www.binayaksen.net/ to learn more about the intricacies of the case and the condemnation of the court ruling, including a recent article concerning Nobel Laureate Amartaya Sen in the Times of India, in which he is quoted as saying: as an Indian citizen and a human being, I must exercise my own judgment to ask if this is correct. Sedition means pulling the state down by violence. It cannot be suggested that Binayak did this. On the contrary, his writing indicates violence is wrong. There is a deep moral argument against sedition here [in Binayak Sen’s book]. Amartaya Sen goes on to say of the ruling against Binayak Sen: It has a threatening nature and seems to have political motivation. Any intelligent person would find that the judiciary acted very peculiarly. I hope the high court or Supreme Court quashes this.
Dr. Binayak Sen is a member of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, the PHM (People’s Health Movement) India. He has touched the lives of many—and this is perhaps considered his greatest crime, the crime of being a positive example.
Dr. Binayak Sen was first arrested in 2007. Though he has severe cardiac disease, he was kept without adequate treatment for two years—until an international campaign, including several Nobel laureates, achieved his provisional release on bail.
When a government punishes work dedicated toward health and social justice, it is making a statement that is global in nature. Its action must then be denounced globally. Please consider acting now in solidarity with Dr. Binayak Sen. Address the government of India with its own shame, by signing the petition directed to The President of India, Rashtrapati Bhavan: http://www.petitiononline.com/sen2010/petition.html
Consider expressing in print your disappointment that this sentence, egregious and wrong, has happened. Inquire into the health, not just of Dr. Binayak Sen, but of the patients who he has not been and will not be able to attend to because of his sentence. Demand that, in the name of justice, as well as health, the sentence be refuted (still legally possible by the Supreme Court of India) and his work instead granted the affirmation it deserves.
Please share what is happening to Dr. Binayak Sen with colleagues, local community members and your own government representatives, no matter where you live. Consider writing to him yourself, to express your solidarity and your appreciation of his example.
So a perfectly reasonable, incremental-approach type bill, AB 2540, by Assembly Member Hector De La Torre (D- South Gate), which would have made it illegal for a health plan to collect a policyholder’s premiums and then rescind coverage after the member becomes ill, was vetoed (so much for the promise of an end to rescisions).
Similarly, AB 2042, by Assembly member Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles), which would have prohibited health plans from raising rates more than once each calendar year, was also vetoed (so much for PPACA helping you keep your plan if you like it).
The California governor also vetoed AB 1600, by Assembly member Jim Beall (D-San Jose), which would have required most health insurers to cover the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and AB 113, by Assembly member Anthony Portantino (D-La Cañada Flintridge), which would have required most health insurers to cover mammograms (so much for PPACA enhancing preventive health care).
Why would the California governor so blatantly block legislation that would clearly favor ordinary citizens vis-a-vis corporate actors, however important a question, is not the topic of this posting. Nor is the problem with health care corporations, whose first fiduciary responsibility, like that of any other corporation, is to produce profit for shareholders.
The real question is why leave a basic human need and social right to corporate America in the first place and what is the role of ordinary citizens of democratic nations in deciding upon this and similar issues.
It is high time that these questions be debated in every American household. Their answer will determine what type of country and society we will bestow on our children.
Insurers are no longer permitted to rescind coverage for technical mistakes made on patient applications
Lifetime monetary limits on insurance coverage will end
Adult children will be allowed to remain on their parents’ plan until age 26
Insurers will be required to provide certain no-cost preventive services, such as colonoscopies, immunizations and mammograms
Consumers will be allowed to appeal claims decisions through an external review process.
These are only a few of the many provisions that take effect as of today, and that as it appears we are supposed to celebrate. But are we?
Not just yet. Let’s look at the “good news” through an alternative, and equally plausible, lens:
Number 1: While insurers may not be permitted to rescind coverage for technical mistakes made on patient applications, they will be able to do so based on other considerations. For instance, based on“intentional misrepresentation”, the number 1 reasons insurers allege to cancel policies.
Number 2: While lifetime monetary limits on insurance coverage will end, these limits apply only to covered services. Uncovered ones will be on patients, as they always have been. And as insurers are permitted to sell policies that cover as little as 60% of covered services (again, only covered services), patients will be extremely vulnerable to financial ruin if they become seriously ill.
Number 3: Yes, your “adult child” will be able to remain on your plan (assuming you have one and you or your “child” pay for the coverage) until age 26. And if you signed up to receive email alerts from Barak’s cheerleaders, Organizing for America, you may have read illustrative stories about the law’s goodness. For instance, you may have read that Kristin, a recent grad living in Scottsdale, Arizona, laments that health reform was not implemented last year, because it would have allowed her to remain on her mom’s plan, something that young folks now are able to do….until they turn 26, of course. But clearly this is only good news compared to the status quo, yet why should this be our standard? If Kristen lived in Canada, or in the UK, or anywhere else in the industrialized world, including Taiwan (and soon in China) she would not be hoping to remain forever young just to have access to her parents’ coverage – at least not for those reasons – because her health care needs would be covered as a matter of right, and for life.
Number 4: Yes, insurers will be required to provide certain no-cost preventive services, but, who do you think is going to foot the bill? You guessed it! All of us in the form of increased premiums — together with the bill for any other provision that affects insurers’ bottom line, such as the provision that insurers spend no more than 20% in administrative overhead.
Just getting a tad ahead of us (and of the law), as California Healthline noted earlier this week, Blue Shield of California has ended its “one-year rate guarantee”. This means that Blue Shield will be able to increase health plan rates throughout the year, instead of waiting for the annual renewal period. As a company spokesperson reported, Blue Shield opted to end the rate “because of forthcoming changes under the federal health reform law”. All which, according to the same source, has left Democrats and Republicans scratching their heads, seeking reasons behind hikes in premium costs (really???).
Ok. If depression has not prevented readers to read this far, let’s examine “reason for celebrating number 5″. As it appears, as of today “consumers” (we’re all consumers now) will be allowed to appeal claims decisions through an external review process. Now, assuming that it is good news that the bad guy will be still around yet now we are allowed to defend ourselves from him, the downside is that it is unclear who will be in charge of those appeals, or more importantly, who will pay for them. Indeed, just days ago, the same California Healthline announced that “state agencies have limited resources to implement reform law”.
Should we be surprised? Not at all. Indeed, the law was not passed to make ordinary Americans happy, although that was certainly the rhetoric. It was passed to satisfy the real constituency of the folks in Washington, a corporate lobby that has hijacked American democracy. In fact it was drafted by a member of that lobby, a WellPoint executive, himself. And they surely have reason to celebrate, now that they’ve been given at least $447 billion in taxpayer money to subsidize the compulsory purchase of their shoddy products.
Can we do something about it? Yes we can. We can, and must, demand a public single payer system that streamlines administration, stops wasting money in paper pushing or inflated prices, puts back medical decisions where they belong — in the hands of providers and patients — and allows us to make badly needed improvements in the health care delivery system – increasing the number of primary providers, emphasizing primary care, and so forth.
We need a new civil rights type movement. We need to demand health care justice for all.
So the latest Census has “revelaled” what was really not hard to suspect: the number of Americans living in poverty, including children, has risen to unprecedented levels (even as the richest keep getting richer), and the rates of uninsured (not to mention the “elephant in the room”, the underinsured) have reached unprecedented levels as well. Notably, as employers shift more health care costs to their employees, and insurers bend over backwards to market “consumer-driven”, bare bones policies, rates of those insured through a job have decreased as well. Had the government, on taxpayers money, not pitched in incorporating more people into Medicaid (even as it dismantles the program), the situation could be far more dire.
Put another way, as the employer-based and private for profit driven health care system crumbles, publicly financed health care comes to the rescue (remember taxpayers’ bailing out the banks? more of the same…).
So how has the Obama Administration reacted to this catastrophe? Well, by implementing a federal health care reform law whose centerpiece is….yes, you guessed it: employer-based and private for profit driven health care!
Let’s think about it: do we really need “more evidence”, or to “wait and see” whether this form of health care financing will finally work? Readers can form their own judgment — there is no paucity of evidence, national or international, in these matters. Below goes some analysis that can help, including a table with a state-by-state analysis.
Number of uninsured skyrockets 4.3 million to record 50.7 million in 2009
Big leap points to urgency of enacting single-payer Medicare for all: national doctors’ group
By Physicians for a National Health Program. September 16, 2010
Contact:
Quentin Young, M.D.
Olveen Carrasquillo, M.D.
Margaret Flowers, M.D.
Mark Almberg, PNHP, (312) 782-6006, mark@pnhp.org
Local physicians in almost all 50 states available for comment (See historical table of uninsured by state below).
Official estimates by the Census Bureau showing a dramatic spike of 4.3 million in the number of Americans without health insurance in 2009 – to a record 50.7 million – underscore the urgency of going beyond the Obama administration’s new health law and swiftly implementing a single-payer, improved Medicare-for-all program, according to Physicians for a National Health Program, a 17,000-member physician group.
The Census Bureau reported that 16.7 percent of the population lacked health insurance coverage in 2009, up from 15.4 percent in 2008, when 46.3 million were uninsured.
Lack of health insurance is known to have deadly consequences. Last year researchers at Harvard Medical School showed that 45,000 deaths annually can be linked to lack of coverage.
“Tragically, we know that the new figures of uninsured mean a preventable annual death toll of about 51,000 people – that’s about one death every 11 minutes,” said Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator of PNHP. Young is a Chicago-based retired physician whose private medical practice once counted President Obama among its patients.
Young said that even if the administration’s new health law works as planned, the Congressional Budget Office has projected about 50 million people will be uninsured for the next three years and about 23 million people will remain uninsured in 2019.
“Today’s report suggests those projections are likely too low,” he said.
The jump of 4.3 million uninsured is the largest one-year increase on record and would have been much higher – over 10 million – had there not been a huge expansion of public coverage, primarily Medicaid, to an additional 5.8 million people.
The rise in the number of uninsured was almost entirely due to a sharp decline in the number of people with employer-based coverage by 6.6 million. In 2009, 55.8 percent of the population had such coverage, having declined for the ninth consecutive year from 64.2 percent in 2000.
The record-breaking number of uninsured – exceeding 50 million for the first time since the Census Bureau started keeping records – includes 7.5 million children.
The biggest jumps in the percentage of uninsured were in Alabama, Oklahoma, Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, Delaware, North Carolina and Florida. In terms of absolute numbers, the biggest increases were in California, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Alabama, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Massachusetts, 295,000 people remain uninsured despite that state’s 2006 reform. (See link below for historical tables of the uninsured by state.)
“The only way to solve this problem is to insure everyone,” Young said. “And the only way to insure everyone at a reasonable cost is to enact single-payer national health insurance, an improved Medicare for all. Single payer would streamline bureaucracy, saving $400 billion a year on administrative overhead, enough to pay for all the uninsured and to upgrade everyone else’s coverage.”
Dr. Olveen Carrasquillo, a PNHP board member and chief of general internal medicine at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, noted that the Census Bureau was once again silent on the pervasive problem of “underinsurance.”
“Not having health insurance, or having poor quality insurance that doesn’t protect you from financial hardship in the face of medical need, is a source of mounting stress and poor medical outcomes for people across our country,” Carrasquillo said. New research has found that about 14.1 million children and 25 million non-elderly adults were underinsured in 2007, a figure that is likely much higher today.
“The government subsidies under the new health law will not be sufficient to provide quality and affordable coverage to the vast majority of Americans,” he said. “Tens of millions will remain uninsured, underinsured and without access to care. We need more fundamental reform to a single-payer national health insurance program.”
Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) is an organization of more than 17,000 doctors who support single-payer national health insurance. To speak with a physician/spokesperson in your area, visit www.pnhp.org/stateactions or call (312) 782-6006.
Posted in Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP blog) on Friday, Jul 2, 2010
By Claudia Chaufan MD, PhD
In a recent issue in the New England Journal of Medicine, economist Jonathan Gruber praises the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (PPACA) as a “step in the right direction,” even as he expresses a healthy skepticism about PPACA’s capacity to control escalating health care costs, which he recognizes as “key to the long-term viability of our health care system.” Gruber also argues that there is “shortage of evidence” regarding which approach will meet Americans’ health care needs while controlling costs; therefore there is “no consensus” on what works [1].
Had Gruber looked beyond the U.S. borders, however, he would have found plenty of evidence. For instance, he would have found that U.S. consumption of health care as measured by critical indicators — per capita annual doctor visits, length of stay following heart attacks, or length of stay following normal childbirth – is no greater than the OECD average, and therefore cannot justify the extraordinary level of U.S. spending [2].
He would also have found that U.S. prices for medical care commodities and services are significantly higher than in other nations and constitute a key determinant of U.S. overall spending [3]. And had he looked into why this is the case, Gruber would have found that US high prices are determined by the exceptionally high administrative overhead caused by the system’s fragmented, public-private financing [4] and by the comparatively limited market power of American patients vis-à-vis their counterparts in countries with national health systems where the government negotiates prices with drug and medical device companies [5]. And he might have concluded that PPACA will do predictably little to change all this.
Moreover, the international literature would have shown the author the extraordinary international consensus around nonprofit financing to cover medically necessary services [5].
But what about the dramatic expansion of coverage promised by PPACA? Is this not a step in the right direction? The problem is that insurance coverage, as desirable as it may be, is not health care, but just a means to that end. And the U.S. system is notorious for providing coverage without care. High co-pays and deductibles are significant obstacles to access. Nor does health insurance offer financial security: nearly 78 percent of personal bankruptcies in 2007 that were linked to medical debt involved persons who were insured at the onset of their illness or injury [6]. PPACA, by allowing the sale of premiums for policies that will cover only 60 percent of health expenses [7], will do predictably little to change this state of affairs.
There is, however, an alternative proposal whose financial and policy soundness are based on decades of international experience and evidence. It would improve and expand Medicare to include all residents in the nation or in one state. That alternative may have to wait until PPACA unravels, as it predictably will [8].
President Obama argued that a model of reform as that implemented by PPACA would allow Americans to build on “what works” [9] – a decades-long experience with employer-sponsored for-profit health insurance. Maybe paradoxically, however, PPACA will unravel as employers realize that it is cheaper to pay a fine than pay for increasingly more expensive and inadequate policies, and employees enter the individual health exchanges implemented by the new law and find them so expensive that they “clamor for a nationalized health care system” [10].
References
1. Gruber, J., The Cost Implications of Health Care Reform. N Engl J Med: p. NEJMp1005117.
2. Peterson, C.L. and R. Burton, U.S. Health Care Spending: Comparison with Other OECD Countries. 2007. Order Code RL34175(September 17): p. http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34175_20070917.pdf (Accessed November 10 2007).
3. Anderson, G.F., et al., It’s The Prices, Stupid: Why The United States Is So Different >From Other Countries. Health Affairs, 2003. 22(3): p. 89-105.
4. Woolhandler, S., T. Campbell, and D.U. Himmelstein, Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and in Canada. The New England Journal of Medicine, 2003. 349(August 21): p. 768-75.
5. White, J., Competing solutions: American health care proposals and international experience. 1995, Washington D. C: The Brookings Institution.
6. Himmelstein, D., U. , et al., Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study. The American Journal of Medicine, 2009. 122(8): p. 741-746.
Claudia Chaufan, M.D., Ph.D., is assistant professor at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. She teaches sociology of health and medicine, sociology of power, public health, comparative health care systems and sociological theory. Dr. Chaufan is also vice president of Physicians for a National Health Program-California (http://pnhpcalifornia.org/).
PNHP welcomes comments on its blog by its physicians and medical student members, and other health professionals active in the movement for single payer national health insurance. Comments by other readers are welcomed but may not be posted.
