Dissatisfaction With HMO Care

Re “HMOs Perform Best for the Healthy, Doctors Say,” July 29:

When a newspaper informs us that managed care, the dominant form of health care nationwide, “has evidently failed to win the confidence of doctors and the public,” I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. All the insurance-company-owned politicians can do is argue over competing bills that beggingly attempt to give rights to HMO patients. If it’s evident that the majority of doctors and patients don’t want managed care, why do we have managed care? Regulate managed care? You can’t regulate a bad idea. All you can do is get rid of it.

Maybe now is the right time to create a new government-financed health care system that guarantees first-rate, affordable health care for each of us. Would a new federal sales tax and/or a tax on the Internet be enough to finance a new health care system? What do we have to lose? All we have now is a health care system that only the insurance companies believe in.

= When a newspaper informs us that managed care, the dominant form of health care nationwide, “has evidently failed to win the confidence of doctors and the public,” I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. All the insurance-company-owned politicians can do is argue over competing bills that beggingly attempt to give rights to HMO patients. If it’s evident that the majority of doctors and patients don’t want managed care, why do we have managed care? Regulate managed care? You can’t regulate a bad idea. All you can do is get rid of it.

CALVIN SHAPSES MD

Los Angeles

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* Members of Congress, along with their families, should be required to enroll in an HMO in order to receive medical care. They now have the best, most unrestricted medical care in the U.S. Perhaps if they were forced to receive the medical care they wish to foist upon the rest of us they would understand.

MARILYN FILS PALMER

Tarzana