Health Care Reform

* While incremental reform of health care financing might appear to be superior to doing nothing, the reforms that you cite (“Centrist Health Reform,” editorial, Dec. 20) would only add to the adverse risk burden for the federal government.

Private insurers obviously have no business interest in caring for disabled children or seniors with high prescription drug costs, preferring to collect premiums from mostly healthy people who are not yet ill. Therefore, unless all of the risk is pooled in a single-payer system of universal coverage, the government will be saddled with more and more of the sick, high-cost population without adequate resources to properly cover any Medicaid or Medicare patient or reasonably compensate providers.

GERALD GOLLIN MD

Loma Linda