Moral Medicine and Universal Health Care

To the Editor. —The Editorial¹ "Crisis, Ethics, and the American Medical Association: 1947 and 1997" was important and timely. However, I do not believe that "[t]he main challenge facing medicine today is to ensure that free-market medicine remains moral medicine." On the contrary, I believe that the main challenge of American medicine is to use its influence to promote the development of a universal health care system in this country. "Moral medicine" is more easily assured in a universal system. That the medical establishment has missed every window of opportunity over the past half century to foster its development is probably one reason for the crisis in free-market medicine. Conditions in the United States stand in stark contrast to those in Taiwan, which has a universal health insurance system, described in the same issue.² Taiwan was a third-world country 3 decades ago and now has a successful industrial