Spokane7
48°
September 27, 2009 in Letters
Health care needs fix
Our nation’s health care system is in need of serious repair. I want to thank The Spokesman-Review for its editorial supporting U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell’s work to reform Medicare and make sure Washington state doctors are rewarded for providing high-quality and efficient care.
For three decades our state has been punished for providing good care for less money. In some states, which have a lot of waste and inefficiencies in their health care systems, hospitals and physicians are paid three times as much per patient as their colleagues in Washington. We need to change this unfair system.
The physicians in Washington are ready to teach the rest of the country how to deliver great medical care without wasting our community’s dollars. Let’s reform this broken system, while also working to increase access to high-quality, affordable care for all.
Deb Harper, M.D.
Spokane
Choose acts of kindness 
BillWatson on September 27 at 4:53 a.m.
No one except the health care industry has been, “waiting for years”, for the mess that is being foisted off on us now as reform.
Health care can be fixed for people, employers and taxpayers quickly, and save hundreds of billions of dollars annually, if the President and legislators would allow the use of what President Obama has called “government’s unfair advantages”, to be used to pay for, using a sales tax, and deliver, through VA style government hospitals, high quality low cost health care, as part of the reform solution.
Two choices should be offered to everyone to use either; free public care, sales tax funded, from a new national health system, no insurance, no co pays, free period, or alternatively to use privately purchased private care.
Employers who select public care for their employees would not be required to pay for or have any further involvement with health care.
Private unlimited choices could be purchased, and always free public care would be available.