Rate setting is not the solution

THANKS TO the Globe Spotlight Team for the revealing articles "A handshake that made healthcare history" (Page A1, Dec. 28) and "State panel to examine payments to Partners" (Page A1, Jan. 1). These reports show how our already stretched resources are unfairly allocated and our costs pushed upward under a system in which healthcare is delivered as a commodity, price discrimination is the rule, and large insurers and hospitals with market share can edge out those serving low-income communities.

The Globe's Jan. 5 editorial "Time for a second opinion," however, essentially calls for statewide hospital rate setting, which Massachusetts instituted in the 1970s and finally repealed in the early 1990s in favor of managed care. Healthcare costs in the United States are between two and three times as high as those in countries providing universal, public health coverage, and our costs are rising at higher, unsustainable rates. Rate setting was no match for the underlying causes of skyrocketing costs: the waste inherent in our commercial healthcare system, and our inability to budget the resources we have. Instead of turning the clocks back two decades, why don't we look to successful countries and adopt a universal, single payer healthcare plan that would cover everyone and control costs for the future?

Benjamin Day
Director
Mass-Care
Boston