Health care systems

In your editorial, “A Better Health System” (BDN, Aug. 28), your first sentence cites the results of a “…national survey completed for the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health Care System,” as follows: “Three quarters of American adults want fundamental changes or complete rebuilding of the nation’s health care system.”

It’s an oft-told tale of a “study” that (you say) is predicted by its executive director to “end up advocating … a public-private system rather than an all-tax supported system. He cites broad opposition to an all-tax plan and the failure of the Clinton health plan.” (I don’t remember that the Clinton plan got off the drawing board.)

Getting back to the final paragraph of the editorial, you say: “Whatever their specific formula, we can hope … they will propose a system … as good as those of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Great Britain. All of them, says the fund, far outrank the U.S. system in patient safety, ‘patient centeredness,’ efficiency and equity – and at half our per capita cost.

I may be misinformed, but aren’t all those praiseworthy systems national, universal health care systems?

Robert C. Dick

Castine