Tue 26 Jun 2007
NFR in the Chicago Tribune
Posted by Helen Evans under Announcements
[8] Comments
I am pleased to tell you that I have had an opinion editiorial published in today’s Chicago Tribune.
This follows a series of speeches that I recently gave in Washington DC, about which I will tell you more in the next day or so.
8 Responses to “ NFR in the Chicago Tribune ”
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[...] Evans, director of Nurses for Reform, is much more representative of nurses in general. Moreover, she has spent more than twenty years [...]
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[...] Evans, director of Nurses for Reform, is much more representative of nurses in general. Moreover, she has spent more than twenty years [...]
I was ashamed for you as a nurse, and as a woman, to see your article in the Trib today. It really seems that you are merely a shill for the corporate healthcare agenda. You can do better than that, as a nurse and as a woman. Please try.
For readers who are new to health policy, let me assure you that Ms. Evans has it completely backwards. And it is not only nurses like me who know this, it is doctors too.
Take this communication I rcv’d just today from Don McCanne, MD, in Californie, USA, on the failings of the private insurance model:
“Health care costs are now too high for average-income individuals to pay premiums that are set by the collective health care costs of the pool, plus added administrative costs, divided by the total number of
participants in the pool, even when the pool has selected a relatively healthy population such as the workforce and their families.
The private insurance model is obsolete.
It is not that we don’t have the money to pay for the care. We are already spending enough to fund comprehensive care for everyone. But
we are stumbling over ourselves in trying to make private plans the funding vehicle when they no longer work. What we need is an
equitable method of funding the health care pool. That would be a simple task if we would agree to establish a single universal pool
and fund it through equitable, progressive taxes.
Keeping the obsolete model of private health plans in play merely because of a bizarre adherence to concepts of political expediency is not sound policy. Yet we continue to allow bad politics to trump good policy. Why?”
to see more of Dr. McCanne’s U.S. Health Policy commentary visit
http://www.pnhp.org
and for add’l health policy info visit http://www.SickoCure.org
As a Brit, Dr. Helen has it right and again Ann has no clue bless her.
UK state healthcare is a disater and more government healthcare in the US is not the way to go.
By the way, I love the way that Ann assumes that anyone who favours private healthcare has to mean insurance!
Dear Ann, you are sooo conservative (note the small c before you get confused), blinkered and narrow minded. Do keep writing though, it is good to have a laugh!
Now for some homework. I suggest you start here: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin056.pdf
Ann’s sanctimonious comments are hopelessly uninformed. And the two web sites she provides belong to left-wing advocacy groups famous for their misleading “studies” and determination to foist socialized medicine on the U.S.
Helen Evan’ editorial was forwarded to me this morning by a producer in L.A., who along with me, holds similar views to health care as does Evans.
As a Boston-trained American emergency physician, whose specialty is most closely aligned with socialized healthcare, I could not agree with Helen Evans more. Moreover, I was fortunate enough to have a scholarship in 1985 to study in England (Guy’s Hospital and Medical School) for my last semester in med school. This enabled me to see Great Britain’s healthcare system first hand, touted by the notably un-healthy-appearing Moore, himself.
Having served on the medical school faculty at Stanford and UC California / San Diego, I have had the opportunity to dispel the often pie-in-the-sky opinions of US med students & residents, as they waxed eloquent–and ignorant–over their glittering views of the U.K.’s “free” healthcare-for-all. Ivory tower management of disease–using other people’s money–and the real world of healthcare delivery–are two very, very different paradigms.
Please–give Helen Evans my sincerest regards for poking a hole in Moore’s bloated balloon. Perhaps it (and he) will shrink to nearly nothing, as a result of her erudite words.
The commentors here come across as self-absorbed ivory tower types. No surprise.
Honestly now, how many of you are on the front-lines caring for the uninsured and the shoddily insured in the U.S. as I am and as are many of those associated with the “left wing” advocacy groups that rely on U.S. Dept of HHS and Int’l OECD data for our “studies? Really now, your motivations are sooooo transparent.
For those who are sincerely interested in how to create and sustain clinically effective, cost effective and humane healthcare systems, look at Ezra Klein’s “The Health of Nations” on TPR online. It describes, with rigorous references, how a number of civilized industrialized countries have dealt with answering that fundamental question.
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/health_of_nations/index.html
In conclusion, eliminating the profit-motive is an essential ingredient for a humane and effective hc system. Competition based on quality, not on cost (which fosters a race to the bottom) is the way to go!
Cheerio!!
That’s it Ann, take to the hills.