Doctors agree: We need single-payer health care
It’s the only system that offers affordable quality care
By LEONARD A. ZWELLING and ANA MALINOW
Houston Chronicle
April 26, 2008
We have all heard it before. The health care system in the United States is broken. We have all heard it, but when is someone going to do something about it?
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is a group of 15,000 physicians who believe that there is a solution and it is currently working for Americans — if they are over 65. It is, of course, Medicare, part of the 60 percent of our current health care system that is paid for and administered by the government.
We believe a single-payer system (Medicare for everyone) would be less costly, more efficient and provide all Americans with the health care they need without an increase in overall dollars spent (an amount that is increasing at a rate of 7 percent per year). This would include the 47 million who are currently uninsured and the estimated 50.3 million who are “underinsured” (spending 10 percent or more of their pretax income on health care).
Until now, doctors who believed in a system of guaranteed single-payer health care were in the minority. However, in a new study from Indiana University published in The Annals of Internal Medicine, 59 percent of the physicians support national health insurance.
This is a 10 percentage point increase from the same survey done 5 years ago. In fact, there are increases in support among doctors in every medical specialty. We expect that physician support for single-payer national health insurance will continue to grow. Recently the American College of Physicians endorsed a single-payer system.
Our group, the Physicians for a National Health Program, applauds the new findings. We are thrilled that the majority of our colleagues believe, as we do, that the solution to the health care crisis is a single-payer system.
Most of us now recognize that the huge administrative burden placed on physicians and their office staffs to comply with the mandates of the insurance industry, and the tremendous profits garnered by these companies at everyone’s expense (rising premiums), have nothing to do with quality health care or access to it.
In Texas alone it has been estimated that we waste $98 billion on administrative health care costs. Administrative costs constitute 31 percent of health care expenditures — and don’t make anyone feel better except the insurance company stockholders.
So, of course, the presidential candidates are proposing these same cost-effective plans, right? Wrong. None of the three remaining candidates has a health plan that matches what the majority of physician providers think would be best for their patients or their practices.
The McCain free-market plan has failed; health care is not a commodity subject to the laws of supply and demand. The Clinton and Obama mandate plans would make everyone buy insurance and criminalize those who do not. Such plans have failed repeatedly in the past and a mandate plan is failing in Massachusetts now.
Incremental plans will not work. Free market plans will not work. Mandates will not work. Only a single-payer system, free of the private insurance industry, will provide care to everyone and reduce overhead and administrative costs.
Only single-payer national health insurance, “improved and expanded Medicare for all,” can provide Americans with a level of care equal to that currently available in most industrialized nations.
The doctors have spoken. What about you? This election year, demand a system that provides Americans the health care they deserve: single-payer, national health insurance.
Zwelling and Malinow are both members of PNHP. Malinow, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, is the current PNHP president.