Majority of US doctors support single payer health care
A new survey has concluded that 59 percent of US doctors support a national, single-payer health insurance plan, while only 32 percent of doctors oppose the idea. That's a huge shift from the last survey, done just six years ago, which found 49 percent in favor and 40 percent opposed.
The reasons are pretty obvious. Rapidly escalating costs have driven the for-profit health insurance industry to deny claims more aggressively, deny coverage to more people, increase deductibles and copays, and just generally act as bad corporate citizens. From a doctor's point of view, the parasitic behavior of the health insurance industry causes patient outcomes and treatment effectiveness to decline, and it damages the overall state of public health:
"Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care, and a majority now support national insurance as the remedy," Ackermann said in a statement.
The Indiana survey found that 83 percent of psychiatrists, 69 percent of emergency medicine specialists, 65 percent of pediatricians, 64 percent of internists, 60 percent of family physicians and 55 percent of general surgeons favor a national health insurance plan.
Meanwhile, HR 676 is still sitting there, waiting for a Congress and a President to come along with sufficient collective spine to tell the health insurance industry to take a hike. The bill would establish a national single-payer health insurance system and would abolish the for-profit health insurance industry.
Our current health care crisis represents a classic market failure; competition and laissez-faire regulation have failed to rein in the outlandish inflation of medical costs, and they have failed to enforce any kind of discipline on the health insurance industry's attempts to weasel out of coverage and claims payouts. Left to follow its own momentum in this sector, the market has failed to improve either the availability or the affordability of health care across the country. In fact, the opposite has happened.
This market failure has resulted in 47 million Americans having no health insurance at all, and millions more whose coverage is minimal and unreliable. The quality of your health insurance coverage and the quality of your health care may be just fine, as long as you're healthy. The current broken system only works for people who never get sick.
Unfortunately, the sick, the uninsured, the working poor, and the middle class have no voice in Washington. Politicians of both parties are owned by the health insurance industry, so we would need bigger guns and louder voices on our side in order to be heard. Those voices would have to be awfully loud, though -- the health insurance industry has given almost $61 million in legalized bribes to politicians of both parties in the 2008 election cycle, and we still have seven full months of full-bore campaigning left to go.
That kind of influence is hard to overcome. However, if the majority of US doctors banded together with the majority of US CEOs (whose companies are drowning in health care expenditures), perhaps Congress and a future White House would find the nerve to ignore the lobbyists and do the right thing for a change.
Our policy-makers tend to ignore problems until after they've become crises too large to manage effectively, and I have no doubt the eventual watershed moment in the health insurance crisis will be no exception. But when it does come time for the lobbyists and the health insurance companies to be given the boot, at least we'll have a majority of doctors on our side.