A group of more than 15,000 U.S. physicians has called on President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress to "do the right thing" and enact a single-payer national health insurance plan, a system of public healthcare financing frequently characterized as "an improved Medicare for all."
"In large measure Senator Obama's victory and the victories of his allies in the House and Senate were propelled by mounting public worries about healthcare," said Quentin Young, national coordinator of physicians for the National Health Program. "Yet the prescription offered during the campaign by the president-elect and most Democratic policy makers - a hybrid of private health insurance plans and government subsidies - will not resolve the problems of our dangerously dysfunctional system."
"We've seen such hybrids repeatedly fail in state-based experiments over the past 20 years in Oregon, Minnesota, Washington and several other states, including Massachusetts, whose second go-round at incremental reform is already faltering," Young said.
An April 2008 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows 59 percent of U.S. physicians support national health insurance. Opinion polls show two-thirds of the public supports such a measure.
"The only effective cure for our healthcare woes is to establish a single, publicly financed system, one that removes the inefficient, wasteful, for-profit private health insurance industry from the picture," Young said. "Single-payer has a proven track record of success - Medicare being just one example - and is the only medically and fiscally responsible course of action to take."
Young said the adoption of a single-payer health system can be a "major component of the new president's economic rescue of Main Street."
"We see no value in trying to bail out the private health insurance industry, an unsustainable system of financing care that has outlived its usefulness," he said. "By contrast, a single-payer plan would provide direct and much-needed relief to millions of American households at a time of great economic hardship."
"Only a single-payer system can achieve the goal of comprehensive and affordable care for all," he said, noting that the estimated $350 billion in administrative savings realized by replacing private insurers would be enough to cover all of the country's uninsured and end co-payments and deductibles for all Americans.
"Patients would be able to go to the doctors and hospitals of their choice and not have to worry about being able to afford it," he said, "and the single-payer system's ability to do bulk purchasing, planning and global budgeting would rein in costs."
According to Young, such a plan is embodied in the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and co-sponsored by more than 90 others, more than any other health reform legislation.
What are your opinions of a single-payer system? Send your comments to Associate Editor Chelsey Ledue at chelsey.ledue@medtechpublishing.com.