Re "End wasteful health-care spending or boomers will bankrupt nation" (Monitor Forum, May 2):

Sen. Judd Gregg is correct that we need to bring down the cost of health care and maintain it at a sustainable level. Like most discussions, he picks one area and avoids the need for a permanent national solution.

Currently, the VA Health Care System provides evidence-based guidelines that achieve much of the quality data needed. The VA provides excellent care for 60 percent of the cost of what the rest of us currently pay.

I suggest he support H.R. 676 currently in the U.S. House. This bill would preserve private health care delivery yet achieve massive cost savings (on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars annually) by eliminating for-profit private health insurance companies in the payment collection and processing cycle and placing everyone on a sustainable taxpayer non-employer based system of payment as well as force competition in drug pricing, such as is done by the VA. The bill also contains provisions to implement evidence-based health care improvements.

The majority of the members of the New Hampshire Medical Society support such a system.

We need Sen. Gregg's help in changing the manner in which we process payment for health care and to implement the system improvements he has mentioned.

More information is available from the Physicians for National Health Program. The Granite State chapter has partnered with the New Hampshire Medical Society in a study group to further examine this system.

Dr. DAVID GOLDEN

Rumney