By Julie ConreyDr. Ed Weisbart is a retired family practice physician who volunteers many hours in safety net clinics both in St. Louis and around the country. He says way too often he treats, or tries to treat, individuals who have to choose between paying for health care and paying for other necessities of life.There’s the diabetic who takes insulin every other day to save money. Or the patient who stopped taking blood pressure medication to pay rent. He’s seen a patient delay being evaluated for mini-strokes because they are hoping and praying their condition will remain stable until they’re covered by Medicare.It frustrates him, to say the very least. In 2012 he was approached by a woman from Huntsville, Alabama, who believed he could do something about it. At first he was reluctant to get involved for fear it would eat up all his time. But he joined her efforts in advocating for a fundamental change in U.S. healthcare.Weisbart is president of the Missouri Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). The national organization was founded in 1987 and has 18,000 members. PNHP advocates for single payer national health insurance that would provide health care coverage to all.Weisbart will speak in Warrenton on Tuesday, February 11 at 7 p.m. on the lower level of the Warren County Administration Building, Highway 47 and Mockingbird Lane. His talk, “Beyond the Affordable Care Act: Healthcare Reform 2.0” is free and open to the public. He will discuss how the United States health care system performs as compared to the rest of the world from both health care and financial outcomes, what drives those results and what we can learn from the rest of the world to better solve our health care crisis. Weisbart will use facts to address rumors, myths and misinformation regarding a single payer national health program. He will also discuss Medicaid expansion in Missouri. The event is sponsored by the Warren County Democrat Club.“People are concerned about health care costs,” said Laura Adams, president of the Warren County Democrat Club. “People are interested in what some of the solutions might be. This presentation is from the macro level about how health care costs affect our economy and how they affect all of us as taxpayers and health care consumers.”While the Affordable Care Act brings many important changes to the health insurance industry in the United States, it doesn’t go far enough in addressing the fundamental crisis, Weisbart said. “To me it’s a moral and ethical fight. It’s immoral for the wealthiest country in the world to have millions not be able to afford to go to a doctor. What we waste on the administration of medical care makes us unable to compete globally.”What is Weisbart’s and the PNHP’s approach to fixing what’s wrong with our health care system? Fix the problems with Medicare and expand it to include everyone.According to Weisbart, our current health care industry is not aligned with the public health needs of the country, and we spend way too much of our health care dollars on overhead. “31 percent overhead in anything is unacceptable but particularly in health care. You have to have health care or you die.” Other countries spend fewer of their health care dollars on overhead. “In Canada it’s 10 percent. Medicare is in the two to five percent range. If you put everyone in the health care program (Medicare) the savings would be more than enough to provide health care for all.”Weisbart believes that adopting a national health insurance program would streamline and simplify a paperwork process that is spread out among hundreds of insurance companies and provides thousands of jobs. What happens to those jobs and those employees if insurance companies are no longer needed?“There are many smart, compassionate and trained people we need for the delivery of health care,” Weisbart said, and they already work in some capacity in the health care industry. A bill before Congress, H.R. 676, The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act addresses that issue. The bottom line: retrain insurance company employees. Their expertise will be needed in the fields of long-term care, home health care, and public health. Those medical professionals who work in the insurance industry can be absorbed back into the health delivery system. There will need to be retraining and job placement services offered to a segment of health care workers. The PNHP has worked with labor unions and others to develop plans for a jobs conversion program which would protect the incomes of displaced clerical workers until they were retrained, according to the PNHP website.Is a single payer national health program socialized medicine? “No,” says Weisbart. In socialized medicine, the government owns and pays hospitals and physician practices. The Veterans Administration and the Armed Services are good examples of the way socialized medicine works, he says. With single payer national health insurance, physicians still own their practices. “All we are talking about is simplifying the payment model so that everyone would have access to health care.”Weisbart considers himself a proud patriot and a fiscal conservative. “It drives me crazy that other countries are doing better at insuring the health of their citizens than we do.”In addition to his role in Missouri’s PNHP, Weisbart serves on several boards in the area. He is an attending physician at the Internal Medicine resident clinic at Washington University School of Medicine where he lectures on diabetes care, strategies to improve medical adherence, cost effective prescribing and the value of generic drugs. He also serves as Chief Medical Officer for RX Outreach. According to his resume, it is a non-profit organization that provides hundreds of brand and generic drugs by mail order to indigent patients across the country.For more information about Dr. Weisbart’s presentation, log on to www.warrencountydemocrats.com. F or more information about PNHP, log on to www.PNHP.org.Physician advocate to speak in Warrenton