Single-payer savings

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On whose dime?

Neither your articles nor your editorial on the frightening ads being developed for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of N.C. to protect its near-monopoly on health care coverage addressed the fact that the overpaid CEO has the temerity to consider using Blue Cross subscribers' premium money to fight health care reform and the effort to reduce health care costs. They are misusing the high premiums we pay to keep them that way

It's like adding insult to injury. Outrageous!

Peter Slotta

Ideas from the GOP

You recently published a letter that rebuked Republicans for having no solutions on how to handle the critical issues America is facing. As a rebuttal please consider the following facts.

Taking health care as an example, Republicans have proposed numerous ideas that would lower health insurance costs and health-care costs without destroying our current health-care system.

Some of these ideas include allowing health insurance policies to be purchased from across state lines (increasing competition and lowering insurance costs), tort reform (reducing costs for physicians and hospitals), health savings accounts (making patients more responsible for their own expenditures) and reducing mandates on insurance policies (reducing insurance policy costs).

Cost avoidance

John David Lewis concluded in his Aug. 2 Point of View that rising health care costs (mentioned by the Obama administration as a prime motive for pursuing health care change) are caused by increased government intervention since 1960 and can be reduced by rolling back certain mandates and regulations.

Paul Krugman, on the same page, maintained that everyone can have health care through additional mandates and regulations. Such is needed, he asserted, to avoid "horror stories" in which people have been denied access to treatment.

It appears to me that Lewis is correct and that Krugman avoids the cost issue. Lower costs would allow insurance companies and others more flexibility to deal more benevolently with the "horror stories," and reduced requirements would free up physicians to concentrate on the main point: excellent patient treatment and advice.

Driving insurance costs

The high and rising cost of health care is a big force behind today's reform effort. Americans spend billions on health insurance, and cutting administrative costs is one of the best ways to reduce the cost.

In America, about 20 percent of the hard-earned money that people and employers send to insurance companies goes to cover their administrative costs. In every other industrialized nation, these costs are 1 percent to 5 percent.

Why are administrative costs so high in America? U.S. insurance companies are money-making operations. Their costs include spending millions of our premium dollars on seven-figure executive salaries, lobbying Congress members to defeat bills that threaten their profits and monopoly, and buying ads designed to frighten us about true health-care reform: a public option.

Medical e-Records companies see positive trend

Pulse Systems and MedAppz, both Wichita electronic health records companies, are expecting business to be good in 2010, thanks to health care reform and Medicare incentives.

The federal government is allocating billions to help health care practitioners make the switch to electronic health records over the next few years. Electronic records can help reduce health care costs and mistakes as providers are able to share information more easily.

Basil Hourani, president and CEO of Pulse Systems, estimates that electronic health records companies have a potential market of 750,000 customers between now and 2015.