Prescribing a deadly cure.

ITEM: There would be huge savings with national health care, contended a Los Angeles Times report for August 13th. "A national health insurance program would save more than $200 billion a year in administrative, marketing and other private-industry expenses--more than enough to provide health care to the 41 million Americans who now lack coverage, a national physicians' group said...."

The group, Physicians for a National Health Program, promotes a system that "would be built on the foundation of the current Medicare program. Unlike Medicare, it would be available to people of all ages and would cover proscription drugs and long-term care." Such a single-payer system, say supporters, "is the only way to provide health care to all Americans, erase large racial and income disparities in health-care delivery, and minimize billing hassles and administrative expenses. 'We've had 80 years of trying to make the [private] system work, and we have more people uninsured than at any time since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid' in the 1960s, said Dr: David U. Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University."

BETWEEN THE LINES: Dr. Himmelstein has been pushing for a more completely socialized health care system since at least 1987. Moreover, this national group pumping for universal government care claims only about 7,700 members--or less than one percent of the 800,000-plus physicians in the country. And many with firsthand experience with single-payer systems want out. In England, for example, at any one time there are more than one million Britons waiting for hospital admission, as pointed out in Oncology Issues by John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis. The average Canadian patient must endure a wait of more than seven weeks before he sees a specialist after a referral by a general practitioner; then another nine-week wait before surgery.

National health-care advocates often criticize the U.S. system. In fact, it does deserve criticism--largely because it is already too socialistic. Health-care spending in the U.S. public sector has reached approximately 46 percent of the total, reports the Galen Institute, with about 53 percent spent in the private sector.

Chaining the effective sector with additional government regulation will provide what price controls have produced throughout history: rationed care, long lines, less innovation, and poorer service.