The Miner Letter to the Editor by Art Greenfield.

Your editorial of October 21, advocating the use of private, for profit, business organizations as medical care delivery systems has holes in it.
You cite the example of Safeway obtaining and distributing flu vaccine which the County Health Department was not able to do, and generalize this by advocating the idea that private enterprise can deliver a public service more efficiently than government can. While this notion has merit, there are many public issues where the analogy is false.

We have a traditional, privately run health care delivery system in this country. The result of this is that we pay five times the cost of socialized medical plans that most industrial countries have. Furthermore we have a large segment of our citizenry excluded from the system, and it is a drag on our economy, causing our products and services to cost more than our competitors do on the world market.
This costly inefficient method of health care delivery has led to the present crisis in health care, which has the federal government deliberating new ways of dealing with the problem. A single payer system operating together with private insurance works in Medicare. It is cost efficient and already provides service to segments of our population. Why shouldn’t this be provided to everyone?

More of the same is certainly not the way to solve our problem.