Sixty-Three Percent of Doctor's Support Public Option Health Care Reform.

The New England Journal of Medicine, (The most prestigious journal of medicine in America) has printed a study that shows a large majority of doctors support a public option to health care in the United States:

In the survey, nearly three-quarters of doctors said they favor a public option. That included the 63 percent who say they'd like to see patients get a choice of public or private insurance and another 10 percent who favor a public option only. [Only] twenty-seven percent of doctors in the survey said they support private insurance only.

TPJ: One of the arguments from some of the opponents of the public option reform plan is that government would get between you and your doctor. However, as well-informed people know--that's not at all what the public option would do. Especially when it's very likely (given these numbers) that their doctor agrees that such an option is needed!! So is your doctor then getting between you and himself? D'oh!! I can just hear brain nerves popping in their heads right now. So are the opponents of the public option going to start calling our doctors communist-fascist-nazi-terrorist-antichrist-unamerican-traitors too? Some of the more fringe types would probably be dumb enough to boycott the majority of doctors in America after hearing this study.

I'd like to set up an experiment of sorts if the Canadian government would allow it. Let's suppose an American tourist with duel citizenship in Canada visits that great country. In addition, this person opposes any form of universal health care in America but gets injured while visiting Canada. I'd like to ask them a very simple question, "Why do you want medical care from a socialist program if its so bad?" You believe that they'll send you to a death panel right? So you should refuse any care from their doctors. In fact you should walk, limp, roll or crawl out of that hospital as fast as you can or else you are a hypocrite. Let's see you refuse such care when you're really sick, injured or dying while on vacation. Oh and let's see you refuse the free charge for it too. I'd like to see you put your money where your mouth is and pay what that treatment would have cost you back in America if you like our expensive system so much.

Is the Canadaian model, the public option model proposed by Obama and all the other universal models throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan to name a few, perfect? Of course not. Is there the potential for a bad experience at a hospital? Sure but the same is true here. I could tell you horror story after horror story about my experience in an American mental health hospital and how it made me want to kill myself even more--not less. Or I could tell you any number of other horror stories about other forms of medical treatment in American hospitals. Everyone knows a horror story either in our private insurance market or a public insurance market. The point is that perhaps the best system is one that lies in the middle where people have a real choice in their medical care whether between a private plan or a public plan.

What could be more American than choice and competition?

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