To the editor: The gathering of items on how tech goes to resolve America’s healthcare issues is placing the cart earlier than the horse (“Reclaiming American management in healthcare innovation: The ‘Make American Well being Tech Nice Once more’ name to motion”; “Cease ready, begin constructing: A nationwide name to modernize healthcare,” Aug. 24).
In fact, expertise and synthetic intelligence will enhance our well being system, however that isn’t the largest downside our nation faces in healthcare. That downside is the decades-long cussed resistance to establishing common protection on this nation. The USA is the one high-income nation with out nationwide medical health insurance. The Los Angeles Occasions piece cites the White Home, the Division of Authorities Effectivity and the Facilities for Medicare & Medicaid Providers Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz — all complicit in a method or one other in throwing 12 million People off their medical health insurance as soon as the approaching Medicaid cuts kick in. We’re heading within the flawed route as a nation. Tech is not going to repair that.
Furthermore, personal fairness, Large Pharma and for-profit medical health insurance conglomerates have now made the extraction of wealth the prime cause for the existence of our healthcare system as an alternative of caring for sufferers. Know-how and innovation are at all times essential, however their effectiveness relies upon upon the muse of the financing system on which they’re constructed. Innovation in expertise can be efficient for everybody solely whether it is constructed on common protection in a unified system of public financing, like “Medicare for all.” In any other case, we are able to count on extra of the identical: big income for a rich few whereas the well being of People continues to deteriorate in distinction to different rich nations with higher outcomes and much decrease prices due to common protection.
Steve Tarzynski, Santa Monica
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To the editor: Does anybody actually suppose, if all of the proposed solutions right here had been carried out, that healthcare premiums is not going to proceed to rise at their present charges?
What’s it about each different superior nation’s healthcare programs, which have constantly confirmed extra in a position to present higher general outcomes at considerably decrease prices, that appears so alien as to be omitted from any consideration?
Conversely, why do no different superior international locations suppose emulating our nation’s healthcare system is a rational alternative?
No quantity of naïveté may lead one to conclude the solutions are as a result of issues about finest medical practices.
Ted Rosenblatt, Hancock Park
