With a likely Democratic-controlled government arriving soon, universal coverage will be the hot topic. Politicians better remember that physician access will be the key to making it work, or else you’ll have a Massachusetts situation with newly insured patients flooding the emergency room.

Doing what Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is doing is precisely not what to do. M-Care is the state’s supplemental insurance program that helps fight the costs of malpractice premiums. To push his political agenda, the Governor is withholding funds until doctors buy into his version of universal care:

Pennsylvania’s physicians are willing to provide health care for those who can’t afford it. More than 90% of us accept Medicaid despite reimbursements that are obscenely low and have not been raised since 1989. But what I, and other doctors, object to is being extorted to fund the governor’s sociopolitical agenda.

I hope the legislature resolves this unseemly debacle appropriately by directing M-Care to start spending its funds on the program’s stated purpose (cutting the cost of liability insurance) before year’s end.

But in the meantime, if you are a woman with a high-risk pregnancy who is unable to find an obstetrician in the rural areas between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, or if you can’t find a neurosurgeon on trauma call in the two-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Erie, call Mr. Rendell. He can tell you about his plans to “cover all Pennsylvanians.”

Doctors will simply leave the state if they are coerced into reform that is not favorable.

Like it or not, we are the backbone of any reform plan to cover everyone. If we are left out of the political process, any proposed plan is doomed to fail.