Call for a National Health System

May 4, 2023

We Don’t Just Need Medicare for All — We Need a National Health System
An Interview with Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein
Jacobin
May 2, 2023

The founders of Physicians for a National Health Program put single-payer health care on the map. Now, discussing the next phase of the movement, they say even single-payer won’t be enough to fix the problems caused by continued privatization. …

Steffie Woolhandler

There’s two countervailing things going on. One is that giant for-profit corporations have a much stronger hold on the health care system than they did when we started PNHP. So when we started, we were mostly up against the insurance industry and pharmaceutical industry. But now there’s all sorts of involvement by banks and for-profit ownership of health providers, so that makes things harder.

The other thing is that the health care system continues to be so dysfunctional. People with or without insurance face massive medical bills, the complete inability to afford lifesaving treatments like insulin and sometimes cancer treatments. The growing dissatisfaction among doctors is now often called burnout or sometimes moral injury. Whatever you call it, physicians recognize that the system’s not functioning very well. So the system’s own problems and dysfunctions continually create an interest in and constituency for fundamental health reform.

Giant for-profit corporations have a much stronger hold on the health care system than they did when we started PNHP.

David U. Himmelstein

We need to have a deep understanding of what the problems in the current system are, and the shifts in the organization of the current system need to guide both our program and our political work. So I think we need to update what the vision of single-payer health care is from when we first conceived of it.

We thought we could control the health care system by replacing insurance companies with a single public financing system. And I think that was true as long as health care was essentially carried out by small-scale practices, mostly individual hospitals, that were not parts of large chains, not controlled by giant corporations. But at this point, we have the vertical and horizontal integration of ownership of the health care system. So for instance UnitedHealthcare employs seventy thousand doctors. Just taking away the insurance business isn’t going to be an adequate reform of the health care system.

We need to reconsider our reforms to think about how we seize ownership of health care assets from the corporations that have come to dominate them, and how patients and people doing health care work can really take ownership of this system. I don’t think it’s possible any more by just taking control of insurance. I don’t see a lot of advocacy for radical reform of the health care system, and that I think is the next phase that either PNHP or some new form will need to take up.

Comment by: David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler

Looking forward rather than backward, progressives need to update the vision of health reform that we and others articulated in the 1980s. Back then, a public financing program that displaced private ownership of health insurers would have had the leverage needed to broadly transform health care. But Wall Street’s subsequent takeover of health care delivery – hospitals and nursing homes, doctors’ practices, and even hospices – necessitates reform of who owns provider resources. Communities, not corporations should control care.

We hope that by speaking out on this issue, we can encourage the health reform movement to take on the critical ownership issues.

A few comments on the mostly accurate PNHP history presented in the article. It was founded 37, not 35 years ago. We note that Ron Sable, and subsequently Quentin Young, and then Claudia Fegan took over day-to-day oversight when PNHP moved from Cambridge to Chicago. Former Executive Directors Ida Hellander and Matt Petty made important contributions to PNHP. We are currently members, but not leaders, of the organization.