Nov. 21, 2025 8 AM PT
To the editor: Visitor contributor Kim-Lien Nguyen dusts off a drained and roundly disproven libertarian resolution to our healthcare financing disaster, arguing that giving shoppers cash immediately as a substitute of to personal insurers will someway magically “empower” them to “make their very own healthcare decisions and leverage their self-interest” (“Subsidizing insurance just props up dysfunction. Empower consumers instead,” Nov. 20). This assumes that healthcare operates as a really perfect free market and shoppers and sufferers are all-knowing in regards to the product they’re buying when, actually, the other is true.
Does a affected person with chest ache that might be a coronary heart assault actually have time to review and resolve on which ambulance service and emergency room they wish to go to from a price standpoint? The identical might be mentioned for each main medical downside. And the sum of money that may be given on to shoppers won’t ever cowl the prices of care.
What is required is what each different high-income nation is doing, which is yielding higher outcomes and decrease prices than the U.S.: a common unified system of public insurance coverage, maybe “Medicare for all.”
Nguyen additionally argues that “we don’t must accept a managed decline of our healthcare system.” However that’s precisely what is required for our financing of the system with the intention to ease the transition to a public nonprofit insurance coverage system, similar to a “managed decline” of our dependence on fossil fuels.
Steve Tarzynski, Santa Monica
This author is the previous president of the nonprofit advocacy group California Physicians Alliance.
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To the editor: The writer means that giving the cash on to people would enable them to purchase their very own medical insurance plan or pay for healthcare immediately. The issue is, how a lot insurance coverage can $2,000 (or nonetheless a lot is allotted) purchase? Or, if paying for healthcare immediately, what occurs if you happen to want surgical procedure or different hospitalization? Neither of those options are actually the reply.
What the insurance coverage firms don’t need People to know is that the very best (and solely) resolution is single-payer healthcare. Weirdly, 32 of the 33 industrialized nations have been capable of make common healthcare work (America is the one one that also depends on insurance coverage firms).
So let’s discover the true reply. Get the intermediary out of the best way. See how Europe does it and make it higher for People. We’ll lower your expenses too.
Ritch Barron, Cathedral Metropolis
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To the editor: Nguyen’s op-ed was intriguing and made me assume. Sadly, there have been no info or research to again up the opinion. The proposals sound like good concepts, however is there any proof or expertise of them working anyplace?
I’d additionally word that the whole thought relies on clear pricing for medical providers. That alone could be an enormous enchancment — one which suppliers would battle in opposition to tooth and nail. Let’s see that occur, after which we are able to speak about empowering residents to make knowledgeable decisions.
Michael Snare, San Diego
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To the editor: When certainly one of Dr. Nguyen’s sufferers wants coronary bypass surgical procedure and the affected person tells her they’ve solely $1,500 of their well being financial savings account, is she going to say to them, “Come again and see me after you’ve gotten a financial institution mortgage to cowl the remainder of the price”?
June Ailin Sewell, Marina del Rey
