Why are physicians in favor of single payer and opposed to private insurers?

[GALTGULCH8]

I find it hard to believe that any physician would be for government involvement in their practice of medicine. After all doctors are usually intelligent, independent, and used to making their own decisions in their work.

Of course some have been influenced by the altruist morality in their upbringing and want to see people get the care they need which these days means that they have "access" meaning insurance.

I encountered a hospitalist physician who complained of the time he spent arguing with an insurance company utilization reviewer who was empowered to grant or withhold authorization for coverage in hospitalization. He briefly described the patients condition as fragile, with unstable hemodynamic problems, sepsis, fever and generally precarious life threatening illness. It sounded unlikely the patient would be able to survive another day. He suggested the reviewer endowed him with super human healing powers when granting one day's coverage by asking if the patient could be discharged the next day!

The doctor stressed his desire that all insurance company assets be liquidated including the John Hancock building and the all insurance companies be abolished and replaced by a single government payment system, in his frustration.

The horrors of Medicare and Medicaid are known all too well by most physicians as well. Government medicine is not the answer.

On the contrary one reason private insurance companies are in the position they are in because of government mandates which demand coverage for all manner of "treatments" which result in exorbitant costs. Even just routine office visits are not generally the kinds of services which ought to be covered as insurable.

The analogy would be oil changes or rotating tires or new windshield wipers in the auto insurance business. Such ordinary anticipated costs are not insured at all and no one expects them to be. One insures against the catastrophic not the routine.

But the State legislatures have responded to pressures from the chiropractors, those who do accupuncture, massage or dance therapy, substance abuse counseling, psychotherapy to mandate coverage for such procedures and this has driven costs up into the stratosphere.

Now of course advocates of even more government intrusions point out the precedents set by earlier intrusions to justify further interventions.

The doctor with whom I spoke told me he has no time to read outside his field to discover which theory of economics is valid on some obscure point of policy and will not until he retires which he expects is going to be much sooner than he had originally intended given all the stress of practice today.

He did at least give me his card so I might email him some links when I promised him I would not burden him endlessly.

The prospect of enlightening the entire population is daunting but that is where being individualistically oriented comes in handy. One can justify a little enlightenment of one individual at a time.

Trouble is that is like being in an argument or a discussion with someone and starting a sentence with the words, "Essentially" or "The point is" for one is then having to decide what to say that fits the description.

What link would you send to someone?

I am tempted to send a subscription to The Future Of Freedom Foundation's publication which used to be called "Freedom Daily"

One may start with OL and the list can become virtually endless, CATO, Reason, Cafe Hayek, FEE, FFF, and on and on.

Life is full of decisions.

Let me know what you think.

[syrakusos]

Walter O'Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers. His son, Peter O'Malley, inherited the Los Angeles Dodgers and also pursued other sports franchises. At the 50th Anniversary Celebration for Atlas Shrugged, Ed Snider told of how he came to the ideas of Ayn Rand.

On YouTube here:

Snider said that he was sitting at a table of hockey team owners and turned to O'Malley and asked, "How can these men vote for something so obviously against their own interests?" O'Malley wrote Atlas Shrugged on a piece of paper and said, "Read this."

Doctors are just people. They know a lot and they are usually very smart, but they are just people with the same limitations we all have. No one is born knowing their best interests.

[caroljane]

Hockey team owners were born not knowing anything and they still don't.

[BaalChatzaf]

It could be that the private medical insurance companies play too many tricks and the doctor is not sure of what he will be getting from them.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Steve Gagne]

We had this discussion when the original obamacare vote happened. Nothing has changed since then.

Insurance companies are still a species of banking corporation, and corporations (especially the banksters) are still collectivist organizations formed as organs of the state. The insurance oligopoly has had continuous legal protection since 1945, as has the allopathic medical profession since 100 years earlier. None of this reflects a free-market model, and fighting the single-payer model under current circumstances amounts to little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Bon voyage.

[syrakusos]

Saint Luke aside, perhaps, doctors are in no way special. Quentin Young is a medical doctor, an explicit and committed Communist, and an early supporter of Barack Obama via Bill Ayers. Read here http://keywiki.org/index.php/Quentin_Young

Some doctors, certainly want this in support of their marxist ideals. Many doctors do not think in philosophical terms. Some doctors oppose it for reasons that we woudl find cogent. A friend of my friend hires Ph.D.s to work in his laboratories. Himself an MD he calls medical doctors "the automobile mechanics of science."

What do you expect? See the story about O'Malley and Snyder above. Knowledge of self-interest is not inborn.