Proposal of the Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance.

The United States spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal coverage. Yet more than 41 million Americans have no health insurance. Many more are underinsured. Confronted by the rising costs and capabilities of modern medicine, other nations have chosen national health insurance (NHI). The United States alone treats health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need. In this market-driven system, insurers and providers compete not so much by increasing quality or lowering costs, but by avoiding unprofitable patients and shifting costs back to patients or to other payers. This creates the paradox of a health care system based on avoiding the sick. It generates huge administrative costs that, along with profits, divert resources from clinical care to the demands of business. In addition, burgeoning satellite businesses, such as consulting firms and marketing companies, consume an increasing fraction of the health care dollar. We endorse a fundamental change in US health care--the creation of an NHI program. Such a program, which in essence would be an expanded and improved version of traditional Medicare, would cover every American for all necessary medical care. An NHI program would save at least 200 billion dollars annually (more than enough to cover all of the uninsured) by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private, investor-owned insurance industry and reducing spending for marketing and other satellite services. Physicians and hospitals would be freed from the concomitant burdens and expenses of paperwork created by having to deal with multiple insurers with different rules, often designed to avoid payment. National health insurance would make it possible to set and enforce overall spending limits for the health care system, slowing cost growth over the long run. An NHI program is the only affordable option for universal, comprehensive coverage.

The crisis in U.S. and international cancer policy.

The incidence of cancer in the United States and other major industrialized nations has escalated to epidemic proportions over recent decades, and greater increases are expected. While smoking is the single largest cause of cancer, the incidence of childhood cancers and a wide range of predominantly non-smoking-related cancers in men and women has increased greatly. This modern epidemic does not reflect lack of resources of the U.S. cancer establishment, the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society; the NCI budget has increased 20-fold since passage of the 1971 National Cancer Act, while funding for research and public information on primary prevention remains minimal. The cancer establishment bears major responsibility for the cancer epidemic, due to its overwhelming fixation on damage control--screening, diagnosis, treatment, and related molecular research--and indifference to preventing a wide range of avoidable causes of cancer, other than faulty lifestyle, particularly smoking. This mindset is based on a discredited 1981 report by a prominent pro-industry epidemiologist, guesstimating that environmental and occupational exposures were responsible for only 5 percent of cancer mortality, even though a prior chemical industry report admitted that 20 percent was occupational in origin. This report still dominates public policy, despite overwhelming contrary scientific evidence on avoidable causes of cancer from involuntary exposures to a wide range of environmental carcinogens. Since 1998, the ACS has been planning to gain control of national cancer policy, now under federal authority. These plans, developed behind closed doors and under conditions of nontransparency, with recent well-intentioned but mistaken bipartisan Congressional support, pose a major and poorly reversible threat to cancer prevention and to winning the losing war against cancer.