"Medicare for all is the only reform that has a prayer of providing universal coverage while containing costs," Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, writes in a Boston Globe opinion piece. Angell writes that Medicare "is far more efficient than private insurance, with overhead of less than 4%," and that, because "it is administered by a single public agency, controlling costs would be possible." In addition, Medicare "cannot select whom to cover or deny care to those who need it most," Angell writes. According to Angell, other health care reform proposals "all have the same fatal flaw: They offer no workable mechanism to control costs, mainly because they leave the private insurance industry in place." Under such proposals, "there is little to stop insurers from raising" premiums, "shrinking benefits or both," and "it will take a large and costly bureaucracy to ride herd on all the ways to game this system," Angell writes. She adds that "perhaps the biggest risk is that failure will give universal care a bad name." Angell writes, "It would make much more sense to extend Medicare to everyone," a proposal that "could be done gradually by dropping the eligibility age a decade at a time" and "phasing out the insurance companies" (Angell, Boston Globe, 1/29).
"Reprinted with permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
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