I don't think that's accurate. There are over 18,000 American physicians who are members of PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program) a single-payer health care system.
So maybe your father and his friends object to such a system, but that hardly means that the vast majority of physicians do.
Actually looking at some of the poll numbers, 59% of doctors favor a single-payer system.
31% of all medical costs are attributed to health insurance.... You don't think that eliminating that cost would be better for everyone?
And YES, single-payer would work in this country, don't believe me, then go see what thousands of physicians are saying about it.
http://www.pnhp.org/
Awesome... so 2.7% of the physicians in the United States support a single-payer health care system. There are 661,400 physicians in the country, so 18,000 is a drop in the bucket. I'll stand by my assessment that the vast majority of physicians are opposed to a single-payer health care system. Oh, but wait, PNHP is an organization of 18,000 physicians,
medical students and health professionals. That means that not all of the members are physicians... they could be anyone from coders, medical assistants, or any number of workers in the health care field. Talk about disingenuous. But even if I give you that 18,000 number as being all physicians, you still only get 2.7% like I said already.
So what poll states that 59% of physicians support a single-payer system? If it's a PNHP poll, then I'm not even going to dignify it with a response. You guys want unbiased data all the time, and that's what you need to provide in this instance as well.
Also,
administration and not health insurance specifically as you claim, is what accounts for 31% of all health care costs. But lets talk about dealing with insurance companies. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of that administration is actually spent getting approvals for and filing reports, charts, updates, and such for.... gasp, medicare patients. As an example, I worked in a Physical Therapy clinic, and I handled getting authorizations for patients. Here are the steps that it took for getting authorization for a medicare patient as opposed to a private health care patient.
Medicare
1) Call an 800 number, put in the patient's information, wait for someone to get on the phone to give you another phone number to call based on that specific patient.
2) Call the next number, wait on hold, finally talk to someone and give them the information that you gave the previous person. They will then give you a fax number to send the physician rx for physical therapy to them for review.
3) Wait 30-45 minutes and then call back, hopefully they've reviewed what you faxed over by then. If they have, then you get to call the original 800 number.
4) Call the original 800 number, hope that everything has been put into the system, and if it has, get the authorization number and put it in the patient's chart.
5) Call the patient to schedule an appointment.
Blue Cross
1) Call 800 number, fax rx over while you're on the phone with them, get authorization.
2) Call patient and schedule appointment.
I've grossly simplified and removed a lot of the details from the process, but you should get the picture by what I said. Guess what, that's administrative work, due to insurance. Getting authorization on a Medicare patient often times took 3-4 times more effort than getting one for a private insurance patient. Oh, and with private insurances, if you had multiples for the same company... you could get them all at the same time. When it was Medicare, you had to repeat the process for each individual patient.
So, let's go ahead and try this again. Link to some unbiased data that states 59% of physicians are in favor of a single-payer health care system. Let's go ahead and avoid the biased information that you're getting from PNHP as well... they have an agenda for a single-payer system, therefore their data is going to be slanted that direction.
