Panel on Health Reform Focuses on Ditching the Insurance Industry

Three prominent critics of the country’s current health care system and ardent reform advocates appeared in Portland today to discuss their views on health reform, President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and what ought to be done to ensure that everyone has access to quality health care.

Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, spoke, as well as Drs. Arnold Relman and Marcia Angell, former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Bruce Goldberg, director of the Oregon Health Authority, also participated. The event was sponsored by the advocacy group, Mad As Hell Doctors and Physicians for a National Health Program.

Schoen put the United State’s health care system in the context of other Western, developed countries. “We are the most expensive country in the world in what we spend per person, and in our share of the economy,” she said. “And we don’t get the outcomes that you expect.” The United States, she said, spends 18 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. “A very complicated system,” she said, and that complication requires time and resources to deal with certain parts, particularly the insurance system.

The insurance system was what Relman pointed his finger directly at as the sole reason for why the country’s health care system has become a “fragmented” “shambles.” “We run our health care system as if it’s a business in the free market … and not like the social service it ought to be,” he said. “In no other country do they make that terrible mistake.”...