Single-payer champion to testify before president's council
A prominent advocate of a single-payer national health system will make her case to a presidential commission later today.
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler (left, in file photo) of Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School is scheduled to testify at 2 p.m. before the President’s Council on Bioethics, which is meeting today and tomorrow in Chicago. The group is weighing various approaches to reforming healthcare.
An internal medicine physician, Woolhandler has researched inequalities in health and health care, administrative costs in medicine, and national health insurance. She supports the idea of a national health insurance system, under which private insurers would be eliminated and the government -- the single payer -- would cover all Americans through an expanded version of Medicare.
Other experts scheduled to present plans include Len Nichols, director of the health policy program for the New America Foundation, and James Capretta, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.
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Elizabeth Cooney covers health for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. She
previously reported on business and was an editor at the paper. Earlier in
her career, she edited medical books and journals at Little, Brown, and
worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
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