Talking About Single Payer: Health Care Equality for America

By controlling expenses that do not help patients, a single payer system will simplify our health care system, improve the quality of care, and provide savings that far exceed the cost of extending coverage to every American.

Johns Hopkins transplant surgeon Dr. James Burdick outlines a viable approach to improving health care delivery to cover every American. Quality will be improved while costs will be lowered, ending the misery and grievances plaguing U.S. health care today.

The essence of the plan is to empower a transparent, apolitical national public-private Doctors Board to independently oversee care using a new approach to monitor quality.  Joined with a convenient national electronic medical record system, this unique single payer system will free doctors to deal with each patient individually.  With these innovations, Dr. Burdick’s plan also limits market influences and politics in medical decisions so that each patient can receive care appropriate to their personal medical needs.

Thirty interviews with a broad range of authorities provide startling new insights about the adoption of a single payer structure for American health care. These expert opinions complement Dr. Burdick's own clinical and Federal experience as a leader in overseeing the country's organ transplantation program.

Through these unique initiatives, Dr. Burdick provides commonsense solutions to the political and social challenges currently anchoring American health care to costly and medically inferior practices.  Such progress, Dr. Burdick predicts, is more possible now than ever before. The time is right for single payer!

Dr. Burdick obtained an MD in 1968 at Harvard Medical School, followed by a Surgical Residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After Fellowships in the Public Health Service and in Transplantation at the Massachusetts General Hospital, he had a career doing vascular surgery and abdominal organ transplants for 25 years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. His academic work has included laboratory and clinical research in controlling the allograft immune response. He was on the Board of the Mid-Atlantic Renal Coalition (ESRD Network 5), the Council of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and is a Past President of the SouthEastern Organ Procurement Foundation and Past President of UNOS, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network contractor. Starting in 2003, he served for five years as Director of the Division of Transplantation in the Healthcare Systems Bureau of the Health Resources Services Administration, an agency in the US Department of Health and Human Services. Presently he is on the Board of the Baltimore City Medical Society of the Maryland MedChi and is a Professor of Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.