HEALTH CARE "MELTDOWN"

The US health care system is fast approaching crisis status, and if business continues as usual, without major changes, there will be meltdown by 1996, predicts George Lundberg, editor-in-chief of scientific publications at the American Medical Association.

Writing in the Journal of the AMA this week, Dr Lundberg notes that the doubling time for US health care expenditures is now less than five years. "We are looking at potential health care expenditures in 1992 dollars of $1.4 trillion by 1996," he says, adding: "I do not believe our economy can tolerate these costs."

In a worst-case scenario, he believes, the Congress would panic and nationalize the entire health care industry. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other health care workers would be conscripted as government employees, hospitals would be taken over and run by the government, health insurance companies would be abolished and the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries would be nationalized. Such an event, he says, would be "tragic, catastrophic and certain to fail over time. I cannot imagine a government monopoly of that size succeeding."