Why does the United States need universal health care?
David Himmelstein: Forty-three million people in the United States have no health insurance at all, and tens of millions more have such inadequate coverage that if they were seriously ill, they would be bankrupted. Millions of Americans don’t get the care they need. And simultaneously, we are throwing away huge resources on useless bureaucracy, outrageous profits, outright fraud and unnecessary overtreatment for many patients. We need a thorough revision of our system to deliver the care to the people. We now have the most expensive health care system in the world. We pay money to middlemen – private insurance companies and HMOs – who do nothing useful. These private insurers act on behalf of employers to limit care to patients and simultaneously extract profits for themselves and other health care providers. MM: But the insurance companies do provide coverage to tens of millions of people in the United States, right? Himmelstein: They pass some of the money paid in premiums along to t
