"As of 1999, more than 43 million people in the United States did not hold any form of public or private health insurance, while health-care expenditures totaled more than one trillion dollars annually, equivalent to about 14 percent of the gross domestic product. Many people with insurance coverage still experienced major barriers to access, due to copayments or other deductible provisions. Most strikingly, every proposal for a national health care program in the United States, intended to address the problems of inadequate access and highcosts, failed. As the United States enters the new millennium, it remains the only economically developed country without a national health program that ensures universal access to care . . . . The structures of oppression and the social origins of illness . . . have emerged as even greater problems as corporate penetration of health care has increased."
------Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness
"But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees or a healer of the sick?"
------Plato, The Republic
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