Dr. David U. Himmelstein is scheduled to speak from 4 to 5 p.m. in Room A114 of Drachman Hall at the University of Arizona's Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, 1295 N. Martin Ave. The lecture is free and open to the public.
He is expected to criticize the newly health-care law as a halfway measure that will reinforce the role of private insurers, push costs up and leave at least 23 million people uninsured. His organization says that because being uninsured raises a person's chance of dying by about 40 percent, that will translate into 23,000 unnecessary deaths per year.
The title of Himmelstein's talk is "Health Reform 2.0: Reboot, Retry."
The group Himmelstein helped found is Physicians for a National Health Program. It consists of 17,000 doctors who advocate for single-payer national health insurance, arguing that private-insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third of every health-care dollar. The group says streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
Himmelstein and other supporters of universal health care say the need for a single-payer system will increase with time.
His group has criticized President Obama's health-care policy, saying it will ship hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private insurance industry in the form of subsidies.
And the law's mandate that individuals buy insurance will force millions of Americans to purchase insurers' "skimpy products," which already leave middle-class families vulnerable to economic hardship and medical bankruptcy in the event of a serious illness, the group says.
Himmelstein is a primary-care physician in Cambridge, Mass., an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of social and community medicine at Cambridge Hospital. His lecture is supported by the James E. Dalen Distinguished Lecture for Health Policy Endowment, which supports visiting professors in health policy.
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Why Harvard Doc is Pushing for Single-Payer CareOriginally from: http://www.nursinglink.monster.com/news/articles/12310-why-harvard-doc-is-pushing-for-single-payer-care
View this post on my blog: http://travelnursesuccess.com/why-harvard-doc-is-pushing-for-single-payer-care-2
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