A New Health Care Plan...Physicians for national health program finds willing ears in Ithaca
By Karen Gadiel
Ithaca Times
05/07/2008
A group of area physicians, frustrated by the limitations of providing health care to all who need it, recently formed a regional chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, or PNHP. “We think the time has come,” said Dr. John Paul Mead, doctor of internal medicine.
Dr. John Paul Mead
(Photo by Rachel Philipson)
Two factors put this issue front and center for Mead and his fellow organizers - a core group of at least 10 physicians attended the first meeting in April, and their numbers are expected to grow.
“First, there’s the continuing erosion of a physician’s ability to take care of people who are ill,” Mead said. About 15 percent of patients in Tompkins County are uninsured, with a further 10 percent so under-insured that physicians can’t afford to treat them.
“It’s a problem of access,” Mead said. “We want to take care of them, but you can’t keep going when a quarter of your clients can’t pay - and of the remaining three quarters with insurance, those plans have been ratcheted down and kept flat until there’s nothing left over for the patient who needs free care.”
He cites a host of unavoidable expenses that can turn a medical practice into a small business on shaky financial ground. These include student loan repayments, office overhead and increased malpractice insurance costs. These headaches can lead to physicians leaving the system or becoming cash-only businesses.
Mead himself recently sold his practice to the hospital, “which has a better ability to take care of the uninsured,” he explained. “When I finished my residency eight years ago, this was not what I had in mind.”
The other critical reason for beginning the group now is the national focus on health care, sharpened in campaigns for the upcoming elections. While both Democratic presidential candidates have been talking about universal health care coverage, many physicians, including Mead, consider the plans put forward to be either unclear as to financing - or unworkable. Preventive health care and the use of electronic records, as both Clinton and Obama have proposed, are not bad ideas, Mead says, but they do nothing to save money.
“Basically, there’s already enough money in the system to cover everyone, but it’s inefficiently administered,” he said.
“For hundreds of insurance companies, 15 to 22 percent is wasted on overhead, compared to Medicare which spends only about three percent on overhead - the rest going to healthcare. Every industrialized democracy has a national plan that covers all its citizens. But we’re on a par with Serbia when it comes to life expectancy. The only people who like the system [as it is now] are those with great health care plans.”
Additionally, he notes, we already spend twice per person on medical care as Canada does.
“Spread it around,” Mead said. “Spread it around in a more equal way and we’d have twice as a good a system as they do.”
Congressman Maurice Hinchey has co-sponsored a bill in the House of Representatives known as HR-676, or The United States National Health Insurance Act (or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act). Though people ranging from Michael Moore to the PNHP physicians support this proposal, the bill is currently stalled.
“It’s sitting and waiting for the election cycle to be over,” Mead commented.
So for now, the group is organizing to get a local conversation going on this issue.
“We want to get the word out,” Mead said. “Ithaca is full of readers and writers to help get the word out and get behind it.”
He’s hoping, too, to build more support for HR-676 and similar proposals as physicians learn more about possible ways to fund health care, to critically look at health care proposals and effectively voice their opinions.
“If things don’t change, we may have to figure out another tier of health care, like the Free Clinic in Ithaca,” he said, explaining that the Free Clinic can help patients with routine areas of health care but currently can’t take care of more complex medical matters like surgeries and obstetrics. “As physicians, we went into medicine to serve the patients, not the insurance companies,” he said.
Whoever wins the next presidential election will have to address health care, Mead adds. This local physicians’ organization wants to be part of that discussion.