This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Practice  • Health Policy  • Quality of Care  • Quality of Care, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: The proposal of the Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance¹ largely ignores the shortcomings of a totally government-controlled health care system. Although the United States may have the most expensive system in the world, we also have the best. To eliminate the private sector smacks of socialism.

As an example of the benefit of competition, a colleague and I founded National Medical Care, Inc, in 1968, which became the world's largest provider of dialysis care. As medical school faculty, we were frustrated by not being able to provide care for patients with chronic kidney failure even though the technology had already been developed. As described by McFeeley,² we did so because the academic nonprofit community refused to provide care, opting for more "research" instead. Although dialysis clinics eventually would have been established anyway, it would have cost thousands of patient lives and taken several years. . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Constantine L. Hampers, MD
Nashua, NH

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Proposals for US National Health Insurance
Donald J. Palmisano
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2797.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposals for US National Health Insurance
Michael Patmas
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2797-2798.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposals for US National Health Insurance
J. Timothy Ames
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2798.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposals for US National Health Insurance
Indira Jevaji
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2798.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposals for US National Health Insurance
Vic Velanovich
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2798-2799.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposals for US National Health Insurance
Elizabeth A. Bayliss
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2799.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposals for US National Health Insurance—Reply
Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Marcial Angell, and Quentin D. Young
JAMA. 2003;290(21):2799-2800.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Proposal of the Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance
The Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance
JAMA. 2003;290(6):798-805.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT