National Health Insurance: Panel Discussions Before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, Ninety-fourth Congress, First Session ....

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Page 197 - Nothing in this title shall be construed as authorizing the Secretary or any other officer or employee of the United States to interfere in any way with the practice of medicine or with relationships between practitioners of medicine and their patients, or to exercise any supervision or control over the administration or operation of any hospital. (2) The term "period of disability...
Page 433 - Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Page 441 - Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
Page 149 - Up to 1965, the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Republican leadership were generally allies of the AMA.
Page 447 - Common thought and parlance tend to conceal or deny the fact that demand for all practical purposes is unlimited. The vulgar assumption is that there Is a definable amount of medical care 'needed', and that if that 'need' was met, no more would be demanded. This is absurd. Every advance in medical science creates new needs that did not exist until the means of meeting them came into existence, or at least into the realm of the possible. For every heart-lung machine or artificial kidney in operation...
Page 447 - Medical care under the National Health Service is rendered free to the consumer at the point of consumption — " p. 26 "Consequently supply and demand are not kept In balance by price. Since, therefore, resources are limited, both theoretically and in practice at any given time, or the demand is unlimited, supply has to be rationed by means other than price. The forms of rationing adopted deliberately or by default, and usually unrecognized certainly unproclaimed as such, are among the major irritant...
Page 260 - ... of the problem. For there are two— and really only two— key ingredients to understanding the rise in hospital costs: the changing nature of the hospital product, and the impact of insurance. Of these, the second is the more crucial— and largely explains the first. The changing hospital product The most obvious thing about hospital care today is that it is very different from what it was 25 years ago. Today's care is more complex, more sophisticated, and, it is to be hoped, more effective....
Page 263 - These premiums are also not subject to social-security taxes or state income taxes. Thus, even for a relatively low-income family, the inducement to buy insurance can be quite substantial. Because of the income and payroll taxes, a married man who has two children and earns $8,000 a year will take home an additional $70 for each $100 the employer adds to his income. If the employer buys health insurance instead, the full $100 can be applied against the premium and there is no tax to be paid. In this...
Page 143 - The alinement is clear — on the one side the forces representing the great foundations, public health officialdom, social theory — even socialism and communism — inciting to revolution; on the other side, the organized medical profession of this country urging an orderly evolution guided by controlled experimentation which will observe the principles that have been found through the centuries to be necessary to the sound practice of medicine.
Page 263 - ... expansion in the demand for expensive care, why has insurance grown so rapidly? In part, this growth reflects a family's rational demand for protection against unexpected illness. It is unfortunate but inevitable that this process tends to be self-perpetuating.

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