Doctors’ Group Opposes Public Insurance Plan

Source: NY Times

As the health care debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which President Obama and many other Democrats see as an essential element of legislation to remake the health care system.

The opposition, which comes as Mr. Obama prepares to address the powerful doctors’ group on Monday in Chicago, could be a major hurdle for advocates of a public insurance plan. The A.M.A., with about 250,000 members, is America’s largest physician organization.
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In the presidential campaign last year and in a letter to Congress last week, Mr. Obama called for a new “public health insurance option,” which he said would compete with private insurers and keep them honest.
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But in comments submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, the American Medical Association said: “The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/politics/11health.html?hp

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How ironic that America's healthcare is being sabotaged by the very people who took an oath to protect it.

It's sort of like what NRA is to people that own guns. It's a lobbying organization.

and it does speak for many.

Any doctor who is interested in providing quality healthcare to all Americans should support the public option. Unfortunately, many of them are more interested in keeping up the mortgage payments on their second home in Park City.

Not all doctors are rich man. There are two in my family that practice that make essentially what I do after taxes, insurance and student loan payments. And I'm a software architect for a mid-sized company.

Only 15% of doctors are members.

The only way to keep the private industry honest is a public option. This is the same shit we heard for the past, what, 60 years?

As for the Ill Patients who are mostly unemployed, poor, under 65 and homeless.

The attitude of these gated community Lexus driving, soccer people is "fuck those people they are lazy they should get jobs."

No Perks? no FREE bogus conventions / getting hammered on the golf course / 19th hole stripper parties with Government Public Insurance

not so much the insurance companies. I used to work in a resort town. :hi:

Although you're right, there will probably be fewer.

then they can lower their costs, provide great coverage, become non-profit, and do the right thing.

Oh ... yeah ... they don't want to do that.

I thought that conservatives loved the "free market" and competition.

"I thought that conservatives loved the "free market" and competition."

Amazing how that "love" fluctuates depending on the topic.

ask him to cancel his membership. He is a progressive and won't like this. Or, maybe he'll find out what's really going on.

That's probably why.

Tell him to switch to Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan. They're a better group to give money to, and it's not like he reads his AMNews or JAMA anyway. ;)

We have a system for providing physicians with lots and lots of cash. We see lots of folks without healthcare and literally dying, but almost no poor doctors.

health care dollar. They spend it on advertising, executive salaries, a huge bureaucracy that focuses on decreasing patient care and increasing insurance company earnings. The doctors are not thinking clearly on this one.

If competition actually decreased cost, ours would be the lowest cost system in the world, but it does not. Insurance companies compete by denying benefits to their clients, not by creating efficiencies in the system.

...I'd like to put that in my sig line. :thumbsup:

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but somehow this point never gets made. Folks worry about rationed care, but where I live, it takes months to see a specialist, so there's already rationing (OK, my local hospital is Duke, which serves more than just Durham, but still).

And it never occurs to folks in the MSM that competition is not the panacea it's supposed to be. It results in greater costs and worse outcomes in our system, because all the competition is in cherry picking folks to be insured and denying coverage to folks with expensive treatments. They are so blinded by the free market ideology that they don't see the obvious, which is that demand is pretty inelastic, healthcare is a natural monopoly, and that this is an area where folks will often choose not to go with the low-cost provider, with good reason.

It's called "Market Forces"

Fuck 'em

To provide a market choice that will not make medical providers rich.
I mean how can the bloated profiteering HMOs compete with that?

What a ridiculous argument.

I cannot get over the Republican rhetoric on this matter: "we do not want a system that puts a bureaucrat between you and your doctor!"

Seeking approval for procedures from your HMO, for example, is exactly that. In Canada, for instance, there is single payer, but you never deal with the government unless it is some new procedure or one which has to be done in another province (or country) because of lack of facility, expertise, etc.

Sure the single-payer government run systems of Canada, Uk, France, etc. have their problems, but this is an excellent opportunity for American know-how (which I hear about all the time) to improve the system.

The problem is greedy insurance companies, plain and simple. The health and well being of the nation is at stake. The profits of a few insurance companies that didn't provide the service they advertised very well are not as important.

only themselves. It's all about the money. They rob so many people, let them die because all they want is an extra new care, mansion, etc.

in Europe earn less than they do. What they don't realize is that, in general, people in Europe who are at the top of the wage/salary pyramid, those who earn more than others, earn less than do their American counterparts. It's a different kind of society. The CEOs don't earn as much in Europe as their counterparts do here, for example.

GP doctors here , UK , are not employed by our NHS - they are paid to do work for the NHS alongside any private treatment they may provide.

:grr:

say no more

... than a government entity" ....

How can they complain about being undercut by an operation that would, according to their own tenets, cost MORE, due to
the alleged inefficiencies and waste of government bureaucracies ?

Furthermore: Why did the Right Wing argue so vociferously in favor of Dubai World Ports taking over control of the nation's ports ?


Fucking lying hypocrites .....

:puke:

Head of the Department of a teaching hospital, brought up an interesting point.
She talked about the quality of people who got into medicine 30 years ago, it was
by and large the best and the brightest. There was money to be made and it
attracted an elite group. As a teacher she sees who is the next generation of doctors.
Her observation was that there are still those who are brilliant, though most of
those come from families that have been in medicine in the past, but the overall
level is not what it was. The best and the brightest she sees going into business
school, or law.
It's unfortunate but it makes sense. If you want highly qualified people, you must
compensate them. My parents retired to Panama City Beach, Florida before they died.
The medical facilities there pale compared to Los Angeles. One of the nurses said it
was like a 3rd world country and I would not disagree.
The debate is always more complicated then it appears, most things are. But taking
the profits of the insurance industry, and the costs of administration out of the equation
could be a way of upping the pay for doctors and a way to attract the best and the brightest
again

I have no problems with Doctors/Nurses/Healthcare providers getting duly compensated instead of that money becoming the filthy lucre of the insurance execs.

Particularly seeing how they're owned by the insurance companies and Big Pharma, and are hardly objective on the issue. In point of fact, they're hardly competent in this area at all. Stick to what you know docs, medicine and healing people and stop groveling and kowtowing so openly to your Money Masters. You look pathetic......

- K&R

mine all they want to - at least I won't die somewhere for lack of treatment

but they comprise 15 (or 16) thousand doctors who ARE for a Single Payer Universal Health Care plan.

They better come up with a plan to drop cost 50% and cover everyone in America if they don't want to public option.

the AMA would prefer being controlled by the insurance companies, telling the doctors who they could and couldn't give the needed health care due to cost?

And their being reimbursed for their work would be subject to the fee that the insurance company takes before they get their money?

new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers

new public plan threatens to restrict doctor's ability to earn more money!

... to work in the public system. That's how we did it in Saskatchewan. When the government introduced universal healthcare in the early 1960s, the doctors went on strike and tried to scare the people into believing that the government would hire a bunch of foreign doctors to run the system. So the government, thinking that was just a wonderful idea the doctors had come up with, said "Fine, we'll do exactly that" -- they got hundreds of perfectly qualified MDs to move to Saskatchewan from Asia and Europe, and those doctors were very happy to be working. Many already had experience working in public health care in their own countries, so they were used to the bureaucracy.

Eventually the domestic doctors got on board with the public system. That's because they finally twigged to the fact that they would probably make even more money, because more people who needed medical care would now be less reticent about seeking it. Volume, volume, volume! And the department of health paid the doctors for every patient, roughly the same per patient as they'd been paid under private health insurance plans.

And we didn't send back the new doctors either, so we ended up with way more doctors than before, and a much better doctor to patient ratio than other places.

In order to fill residency slots, most programs have foreign grads come in. In a lot of programs, the numbers are over half foreign grads. Most of those people stay here to practice.

Interesting point.

I think it was the AMA that contributed heavily to the failure of a nationalized health care system, when Harry Truman was pushing for it.

AMA will be the smallest faction that kills single-payer efforts. Lobbies for the insurance industry, hospital industry, and pharmaceuticals will pour mountains of money on congresspeople to buy their votes. Pharmaceuticals won a round already, making it illegal for medicaid to negotiate drug prices.

Single-payer is a pipe dream. Nobody wants it. Except people.

:hi:

Fewer than half of all doctors are members with fewer from each new class every year. Their journal's considered a joke for the most part, and I won't even get into how much I can't stand AMNews, their weekly paper. Most doctors I know, including my almost-ex-husband, think of the AMA as a joke and don't think it speaks for them. Why would anyone listen to them?

And in fact, the younger the doctor, the less likely they are to belong. It seems to be dominated by older, more conservative M.D.'s.

Don't forget that Dr. Marcia Angell is all for single payer -- and she speaks for a lot of docs.

I don't think the doctors who really care about patient care are best represented by the AMA.

Fewer than half of all doctors are members. Part of it is how frackin' expensive membership is. They charge a fortune! Then you get their constant mail, which is annoying, but worst of all is how right-wing they are at the top.

Companies and employees both love paying premiums to those guys so much.

He finds that too many of them are fixated on money and prestige and that helping the patients comes somewhere after that on the list.

He was actually kicked out of two group practices because he didn't fulfill his quota of patients to refer to the orthopedists for surgery. Instead, he found that a lot of the patients' problems could be cured by non-surgical means, such as massage therapy, exercises, or adjustments in their work duties. In other words, he saved a ton of money but was penalized for it.

After that, he went into private practice. He figured out how many patients he needed to see per day to come out ahead, and that's what he schedules. (One of his pet peeves is the fifteen-minute appointment.) He tries the low-cost treatments first and recommends surgery or referral to another specialist only if those don't work.