As HealthCare.gov continues to suffer technical issues, some are calling for the government to turn health care back over to the private sector but Professor Robert Field argues that doing so would be shortsighted in an article featured on Yahoo! News.

Rather than seizing upon any opportunity to deride the Affordable Care Act, its opponents should be examining just how important the federal government is to the health care system, Field said. Citing advances in the pharmaceutical industry, hospital care and medicare that would not have been possible without federal funding, Field argues “It is meaningless to ask whether the government should get out of health care’s way. Computer malfunctions or not, the system could not exist without it.”

Robert Field is a nationally recognized expert on health policy and public health law whose research focuses on ethical issues in managed care, public policy and legal facets of health care reform and genetic screening.