Advocates Of Universal Health Care Rally For Alternatives To Managed Care 
The Associated Press 
This story ran in the Courant April 2, 2000

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) Advocates of universal health care are demanding alternatives to managed care, which they say is a profit-motivated, inefficient system that breaches patient confidentiality. 

''We are saying that managed care has to stop, that human beings are not a commodity and that health care can't be commodified,'' said Justine McCabe of New Milford.

McCabe, a clinical psychologist and her husband, Dr. John Battista, proposed a bill last year calling for publicly financed and administered universal health care in Connecticut.

The couple were among an estimated 75 to 100 people who took part in a teach-in and rally Saturday that was part of a nationwide effort by the groups Physicians Who Care and the National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers Inc. Demonstrators gathered at 42 locations across the country.

''There is only one alternative to the HMOs, and that is universal health care for all,'' said Naomi Shaiken, chairwoman of Connecticut Call to Action. ''Old-style medicine, as imperfect as it was, treated everyone. No one was left behind.''

Many who attended Rescue Health Care Day at the Connecticut Mental Health Center also criticized a proposal to change Medicare from a federally administered program to a voucher system.

Theodore Marmor, professor of public policy and management at the Yale University School of Management, said medical care in the last decade has undergone a striking, unexpected change.

When President Clinton came into office, Marmor said, 37 million Americans were without medical coverage. Now there are 44 million.

''Change without choice is the way I would diagnose the 1990s,'' Marmor said. ''Many, although not all, of those changes were ones that have adversely affected patients, doctors, nurses'' and others involved in health care.

John Ringwald, co-founder of the Connecticut Psychotherapists' Guild, said managed care has resulted in a ''major shift of health care dollars away from clinics, hospitals and health care service providers into exorbitant executive salaries, advertising, corporate profits and the bureaucracies that sustain them.''