control,
and crime prevention. Angell
nevertheless insists, “The fatal flaw in the
system is that we treat health care as a
commodity.”
The fatal flaw is really that we don’t treat it
enough like a commodity. Necessities like
food, clothing, and housing are generally
provided here through private for-profit
markets—markets in which we can choose
for ourselves, with an enormous range of
options, exactly how much of any given thing
we want to purchase, and are using our own
dollars to purchase it. It is true in a sense that
health insurance in the United States is still
provided mostly through private markets. It’s
a product that is purchased, though in most
cases Americans get their health insurance
through their jobs as a form of compensation
and have to take what’s offered that way. This
limits the ability to shop around for exactly
what you want to pay for.
Another big difference between health
insurance and things like food is that state
insurance authorities mandate the minimum
The drumbeat for nationalized health care is
growing louder again. Marcia Angell, a
former New England Journal of Medicine
editor and now lecturer in social medicine at
Harvard, declared in The New York Times last
October that our health system is near
collapse. To prevent this calamity, she claims,
“What we need is a national single-payer
system.” She would model a national single-
payer system on Medicare and finance it
“through a new tax on income earmarked for
health care.”
We should do this, Angell argues, because
medical care is an essential service “like
education, clean water and air and protection
from crime, all of which we already
acknowledge are public responsibilities.”
Never mind that many Americans do not
believe that public agencies are in fact
providing adequate schooling, pollution
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
T H E
I N S
I D E R
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.