What are the biggest problems facing the health care system?
A.There are two big problems with the current system. The first is a relatively easy one to solve, whereas the second – reining in health care spending – is much more difficult. The first problem is how do we cover the 50 million people with no insurance in the United States. Some states have already achieved this. In Massachusetts, this was accomplished through an individual mandate with subsidies to those who could not afford to purchase insurance. Massachusetts, however, did not address the much bigger problem – how to control health care spending. Q. What’s so complicated about addressing health care costs? A. Cost to the patient is income to the providers; what’s cost to the insurers is income to the providers. The only way we’ll be able to rein in the costs is if everybody takes a cut. But this is not something anyone wants to hear. Q. What are some of the challenges with reining in costs? A. Medicare functions under what we call a fee-for-service program with the government sett
