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.

Prior to passage of Obamacare Americans spoke out against the individual mandate they didn't want to change the health care they had they didn't want a 3 000-page bill that empowered 15 Washington bureaucrats to decide the future of the doctor-patient relationship.

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.

Competition makes things come out right. Well what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.

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

The good physician treats the disease the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.