Who Has the Better Health Plan?

The New York Times
Letters to the Editor
Published: November 1, 2008

To the Editor:

While Senator Barack Obama’s health care plan is certainly sounder than Senator John McCain’s, it is far from what it needs to be if the goal is for all Americans to have quality, affordable health care.

In order to achieve that, we would need single-payer national health insurance, like almost every other industrialized nation has.

Barack Obama used to support a single-payer system, in which health care is publicly financed but privately delivered, as it is in Medicare. Unfortunately, on the way to becoming mainstream enough for the presidency, he stopped talking about single payer and now proposes a system that would preserve the role of for-profit insurance companies, with their administrative excesses.

Mr. Obama should know that as long as private insurers are allowed to waste our premiums finding ways to deny care and deliver dividends to shareholders, universal health care in the United States will never happen.

Sarah Ramer
Pittsburgh, Oct. 28, 2008

The writer is a second-year medical student.