President-elect Barack Obama has promised to provide health insurance for every child in America. How will that be achieved? If recent history is instructive, it will not be by creating a single, egalitarian system.

Instead, we will most likely create a two-tiered system - a publicly funded safety net for people of lower incomes, and a private market in health insurance for those who can afford it. That's according to John Lantos, MD, author of a commentary on the issue in October's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Dr. Lantos served on the Task Force on National Health Care Reform chaired by then First Lady Hillary Clinton in the early 1990s. Currently, he is the John B. Francis Chair in Bioethics at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City.

Link: Abstract, Four Recent Health Reform Initiatives: Implications for Pediatric Health Reform, Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, October 2008

Source
Lorell R. LaBoube
Center for Practical Bioethics