The solution to the health care crisis -- single-payer (or building a "way-back" machine)

In all our discussions about the future of health care in the US, I wanted to share a conversation I had with my physician father 45 years ago. I think it speaks to why we're in the shape we're in today re: the exploding costs of US health care despite the deteriorating quality of US health status outcomes.

In 1964, as the Medicare and Medicaid programs were being debated in Congress, my Dad and a large number of other physicians in my small hometown (Columbus, Mississippi) went on local television to protest against passage of the programs. When my Dad came home, I asked him why, since he was always complaining at the dinner table about the fact that 40%+ of his patients were "charity" cases, he would find fault with these two government programs that might end up getting him paid at least some income for those patients.

Among other things he said, one thing really got my attention. My Dad said that, even though he bitched a lot about the heavy burden of unpaid patients, it was his obligation to care for any patients who presented themselves to him, regardless of their ability to pay. The Hippocratic Oath demanded that he do so.

He also said that he earned a good living from the patients who could pay, that our dinner table was often covered with vegetables and meat that some of his patients used as barter for his services (in order to maintain their own self-respect so as not to feel that they were receiving charity care) and that the respect my Dad and his fellow physicians received by serving the entire community was more than adequate recompense for providing free medical care for those patients who couldn't pay.

His last words to me that day: "If we end up with a health care system where physicians and hospitals expect to be paid for every bit of medical care that they provide to every patient, we will end up drawing the wrong sort of people into medicine -- money-grubbers rather than servant-healers. When that happens, the practice of medicine will have suffered a great loss and the health of our community will suffer greatly also."

I know we can't turn back the clock to those days (though I often wish we could). But the next best thing would be to enact a single-payer system. Pay health care providers a decent living as they are now paid in many single-payer system countries, free them from the burdens of insurance-related paperwork and and let them once again earn the deep community respect that comes from serving everyone who needs medical care, regardless of a patient's ability to pay.

Lord, I wish my Dad were still here practicing medicine today. He has been gone now over ten years (a victim of medical malpractice himself) and his former patients (paid and unpaid) miss him, though not nearly as much as I do. His memory makes me want to ask for-profit hospitals and overly-enriched physicians who are subsidizing the tea-baggers and deathers just what part of the Hippocratic oath they don't understand.

I have a bunch of doctors for clients...they all make $500k-$1,000,000...i have no other professional clients that make as much as they do. No wait, I have plaintiff attorneys that make as much..ha,ha.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGKkPEvD2OM

And...er, well, um, notice Nixon's. :(

Times have changed

for many a year. It was the default position in America.

Reagan turned that around and now even liberals often act like Conservatism is the default position in America.

Bryant