By offering individuals ownership and control of their health care coverage we return control to the patients and that is exactly where it should be.

The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

The Patients' Bill of Rights is necessary to guarantee that health care will be available for those who are paying for insurance. It's a part of the overall health care picture.

One of the jewels in the crown of Labour's time in office was the rescue of the National Health Service. As the Commonwealth Fund the London School of Economics and the Nuffield Foundation have all shown health reforms as well as additional investment were essential to improved outcomes especially for poorer patients.

Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.

When the Veterans Affairs Department implemented a program to provide home-based health care to veterans with multiple chronic conditions - many of the system's most expensive patients to treat - they received astounding results.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are without recognizing it causing to themselves.

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients but also the health of our entire society.

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient.