Shift In MD's Opinions on Health Care

North country News
Letter to the Editor
April 18, 2008

Our multi-payer health care system, with over 1200 private for-profit insurance companies, is broken. We spend the most in the industrialized world, per capita, for health care, but have poorer health outcomes. There are 47 million uninsured; many more are underinsured. In NH, 137,971 are uninsured, which exceeds Manchester’s population. Death nationwide due to lack of insurance is 22,000 per year, eight times the one time loss of life in the 9/11 incident. Multi-payer bureaucratic paperwork and overhead expenses waste 31% of every healthcare dollar. On a daily basis, physicians have witnessed their patients’ quality of employer-based coverage dwindle, some losing it altogether to face bankruptcy and financial ruin.

An important new study, published first week of April 2008 by researchers at Indiana University, reflects a shift in thinking among US physicians. A solid majority of doctors - 59% - now support national health insurance that would guarantee quality coverage for everyone. A plan that involves a single, federally administered social insurance fund, a Medicare-like plan guaranteeing health coverage for everyone. That’s 10% points higher than five years ago, and just slightly below the general public support ( 65%) as shown in an Associated Press poll last December.

Last fall a survey of NH physicians was sponsored by NH Medical Society, and conducted by University of New Hampshire. The survey found that 81% of respondents agree healthcare should be “available to all citizens as part of the social contract, a right similar to basic education, police and fire protection,” with 94% of primary care physicians endorsing this view. Two-thirds of New Hampshire physicians, including 81% of primary care clinicians, indicated they “would favor a simplified payor system in which public funds, collected through taxes, were used to pay directly for services to meet the basic healthcare needs of all citizens.”

The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates’ health care reform proposals do differ, but both have the same centerpiece - preservation of the flawed private-for-profit insurance system. Incremental changes that are proposed offer varying packaged embellishments, but do not address the core problem of financing. These two physician surveys are in concert with 65 percent of Americans who are clamoring for change. Let us call for our political leaders to replace the private for-profit-insurance company system and implement a non-profit, single-payer national health insurance system, and thus to stand squarely for the health of the American people.

Marcosa J. Santiago, MD
Rumney NH
Chair, GS-PNHP (Granite State Physicians for a National Health Program)