Physicians for a National Health Plan is a group of radical left-leaning doctors in favor of single-payer health care. As progressive blogger Ezra Klein writes, they are opposed to any measure that isn’t single-payer:
Their take on Obama’s health plan is that it’s not single payer, so they don’t support it. And their take on Health Care for America Now coalition is that it’s not pushing single payer, so they don’t support it.
Their shrill, pig-headed inflexibility is counter-productive in today’s health reform debate.
I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of single-payer, but for a variety of reasons, implementing a single-payer system in the United States is impossible. That’s an indisputable reality.
American health reform will come from a more moderate, centrist approach, using both public and private options. PHNP, being one of the more visible physician groups in mainstream media, should use their resources to push for a plan that’s more realistically achievable and better accepted by the physician community as a whole.
Update:
Here’s a follow-up post: Is Physicians for a National Health Program the biggest threat to Obama’s health reform plan?
Related posts:
- Physicians for a National Health Program doctors arrested, and why is PNHP resorting to criminal activity to push their agenda?
- Should private insurers be kept in the health reform mix?
- Is Physicians for a National Health Program the biggest threat to Obama’s health reform plan?
- Max Baucus on single payer: "I’m not going to waste my time"
- The biggest threat to President Obama’s healthcare reform efforts comes from his own party
- Will doctors get a pay cut under a public health option?
- 10 President Obama posts you may have missed
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Ezra, just curious but why is single payor health care “impossible” in the USA?
I don’t agree that single payer is impossible. I think people are getting fed up enough with the waste of money involved in the bureaucracy endemic to private health insurance that the tide is beginning to turn.
1. A majority of U.S. Physisicians would support single payer, check out April issue of Annals of Internal Medicine:
http://www.pnhp.org/docsurvey/annals_physician_support.pdf
2. Perceived political feasibility aside for one moment, which is actually the better? PNHP’s goal is to advocate for the best plan that can actually work, to provide universal coverage, comprhensive coverage, individual affordability and system wide control of costs. HR-676, Improved and Expanded Medicare for All can do this. GAO & CBO both scored single payer approach as best economically. Continued subsidizing of the wasteful for-profit private insurance companies forgoes $350 savings bilion per year. Administrative waste is a natural byproduct of the private insurance firms that would retain a central role under HCAN’s plan. Private plans’ overhead is 12-fold higher than under NHI; the excess is squandered on marketing, underwriting, utilization reviewers and profits, and for the billions paid to executives. And the multiplicity of insurers envisioned in the plan precludes paying hospitals a global, lump sum budget; such budgets would save additional billions by obviating the need for most hospital billing and much of the internal accounting needed to attribute hospital costs to individual patients and payers.
Keeping the for-profit privates in the mix allows them to continue to game the system (e.g. skimming the healthy and wealthy; dumping the sick, poor, old on the public system).
HCAN’s proposal duplicates key elements of health reforms that have passed (and then failed) in multiple states: Massachusetts in 1988; Oregon in 1989; Tennessee, Minnesota and Vermont in 1992; Washington State in 1993; and Maine in 2003. In each case, rising costs scuttled the reform effort; none had a durable impact on the number of uninsured. The 2006 Massachusetts law, which incorporates many of the features of HCAN’s plan, is already threatened by rising costs, despite offering skimpy coverage and leaving many uninsured. And Massachusetts, with its low rate of uninsurance to begin with, and a large fund devoted to care of the uninsured, offered the optimal conditions for trying such a plan.
Every collectivist dictatorship ever implemented, whether fascist or Marxists had some doctors at the vanguard leading the way or cheering them on.
Power and control has always held a special attraction for many physicians. I guess it is a result of combining professional arrogance of “Doctor knows best” with the inane belief that their is a technical fix to every human problem–or at least a devotion to finding one.
As a patient, I oppose single payer system. It would mean,
1) no more expensive care. That costing $10 you get, $100, you wait, $1000, forget it.
2) Doctors would earn as they do in Europe and Canada, like my gardener, under $100,000. That means, come 5 PM, hell or high water, they go home. Emergency surgery for someone with an ice pick in his head in England? Six days later. After a certain month of the year, the budget ends in Canada, that means all care is for free. That means the doctor cannot be found. He does not want to work for free.
3) Government does nothing well. No known exception to the rule. That means the folks who did the Katrina and the Iraq reconstrustions get to run the nation’s health care system.
4) It is a lawyer take over of the $2 trillion budget. Any doctor collaborating with that should be shunned.
I find PNHP especially hilarious at this particular time.
WE JUST HAD A GIANT EXAMPLE OF GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE TRYING TO SCREW PHYSICIANS.
Seriously. How on god’s green earth can these people want the government to completely take over health care after this latest fiasco? The _only_ stick doctors had was dropping Medicare. And PNHP’s goal is to make it illegal to have private insurance. Ye gods.
I wish there was a way to force only the PNHP advocates to accept whatever the government feels like giving them and leave the rest of us alone.
I’m a businessman–a capitalist and a centrist. Single-payer healthcare is the ONLY cost-effective way to get to universal coverage affordably.
The current system(and extensions thereof) is a huge drag on business, sucking significant dollars from reinvestment, growth, and profitability.
Your opposition to single-payer healthcare seems uninformed by fact. Why are you so opposed to it?
Wow, ad hominem much? If you don’t have any logical points to make, just call names. (Pigheaded? Shrill? Sounds like Rush Limbaugh attacking Hillary Clinton. Can’t you do better?)
Anyway, sticking to facts is always great. So, if you’re going to make a sweeping assertion that single payer isn’t possible in the U.S. or that some other system is better, please, lay out some arguments and facts. Sources would be nice too.
And to Supremacy Claus, your comments have no basis in reality. In a single payer system, doctors go home at 5 p.m. “come hell or high water”? really? There’s much out there to refute you, but here’s one: http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Health/Electronic-health-records-after-hours-care-lag-in-US-primary-care-practices.html
An abstract of an article published by the AMA states:
“A study reveals that the United States lags behind other developed nations including the Netherlands and Australia in using electronic health records and providing after-hours care, especially in the primary care setting.”
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