Where are they going to go? Are they going to become garbage men? I understand that those who drive up costs to pay for their weekend homes in Provence are worried about losing out, but I doubt 45% would actually quit.

On the other hand, another recent poll shows the majority of physicians in the US, like the majority of the public, are in favor of a public option.
There’s little doubt we’d need more primary care physicians under universal healthcare, but that’s just a factor of increased demand and it should be a solvable problem.
Whatever the case, the solution is not to scrap an overhaul of healthcare, but to work on the issues it raises and come to some reasonable solutions. Unfortunatley, the extremests on both sides, but particularly the right, have been screaming and carrying on so much lately that such a rational problem-solving approach will be very difficult.

Your premise — and the poll’s premise — is totally false. Obama is not proposing nationalized healthcare. Never has. Nationalized healthcare would be a system like Canada’s or Great Britain’s where all medical professionals are employees of the government. That is simply not going to happen. It’s nowhere in the bill. You’re confusing the “public option” — which is a plan to open the healthcare insurance policy our members of Congress have to members of the public at large. The thinking behind this is that this will help keep the cost of private insurance plans down because the private companies will have to compete with the public insurance company — which, unlike corporate insurers, doesn’t have as its goal keeping shareholders happy. You are doing a great disservice to the debate by grossly misrepresenting the facts.

Let them leave. I don’t want to be treated by anyone whose main motivation for medicine is a $400,000 a year salary.

Yes, Obamacare has a steep cost all around…but the garden variety Marxist doesn’t care.
But we do need to be careful with these criticisms. After all, any opposition to The One is, as “everyone knows”, racist.
That’s the line, anyway, as in “You’re Surely a Racist, If…” at http://firebreathingchristian.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/youre-surely-a-racist-if/

Note to Kenneth: I love your commitment. Do you think you will get special brownie points for that? Using that theory, you shouldn’t go to any professional because they would also be in it for the money. So what do you do Kenneth? Are you in your profession for the money? Grow up little boy and start using your common sense. What makes our country better than any other country in the world is that people can make lots of money here…capitalism is alive and well for everyone and especially some well-known liberals…Oprah, Steve Jobs, Alec Baldwin, Steven Spielberg. Should I go on?

hmm.
Poll: Doctors Among Public Option’s Biggest Fans
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112839232

Doctors, by a large majority, support adding a government run health insurance program that would compete with private insurance. That’s according to a new survey. What’s been called the public option continues to be one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate, but the survey shows that doctors are already used to dealing with government run insurance.

JOSEPH SHAPIRO: In the survey, nearly three-quarters of doctors said they favor a public option. Co-author Dr. Salomeh Keyhani is a researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Dr. SALOMEH KEYHANI (Researcher, Mount Sinai School of Medicine): The results of the study demonstrated that the majority of physicians support a public option in the United States of America.

Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112818960

Most doctors — 63 percent — say they favor giving patients a choice that would include both public and private insurance. That’s the position of President Obama and of many congressional Democrats.

Here is one doc’s perspective in having to deal with government entanglement (dictation) in health care:

For the past four years, Dr. Heather Tipsword has owned a family practice clinic that primarily treats Medicaid and Medicare patients in Oklahoma City. As many of her friends and family were looking forward to Fourth of July celebrations this past weekend, Tipsword was anxiously looking forward to another event altogether: Congress’ meeting on the Monday after the holiday weekend to discuss some kind of fix to the scheduled 10.6 percent Medicare reimbursement cut.
To Tipsword, this round of Medicare reimbursement cuts, to become effective July 15, could make or break her family practice. (In many states, these cuts affect Medicaid too.)
“I have struggled to build up my practice, but my outlook gets worse each year,” Tipsword said. “The current round of Medicare cuts — which will cut my repayments, which are miniscule right now — as well as increasing malpractice insurance coverage, despite an A+ rating, makes it less feasible for me to continue practice.”
However, the meeting yielded no short-term fix for the problem, and by the end of the session it was clear that the 10.6 percent cut would likely go through anyway.
Now, Tipsword says she is working on an exit strategy from the program. At times, the bureaucratic demands of the job make her consider going even further.
“Due to all the daily headaches of practice — referrals, endless duplicate paperwork to prove medical necessity, phone calls, documentation, etc. — I would honestly love to get out of medicine altogether,” she said.

This will only increase after the government gets hold of the whole system. But hey, those big salaries will go away (with the doctors as they retire).
More here http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=5326078&page=1
Yes we can! Just let Dr. O run things!

“you’re surely a dope if…” you believe this is anything close to marxism.
michele, you made a leap from the article’s title of “45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting” to “45% of doctors would leave”.
so much for accuracy in the right wing propaganda echo chamber.

ms. Ignorant, some are in it for a living and because they love what they do and care about it. then there are those that are in it because of greed.
haliburton showed you what tons of cash can buy: CRAP.

why’d you delete my 2 previous comments, michele? thin-skinned? you don’t like being corrected when you make mistakes?

voila, and they’re back. thank you.

From a well respected polling site:
IBD/TIPP Doctors Poll Is Not Trustworthy
I’m flying 35,000 feet somewhere over Eastern Ohio now — isn’t technology wonderful? — so I can only comment on this briefly, but the Investors’ Business Daily poll purporting to show widespread opposition to health care reform among doctors is simply not credible. There are five reasons why:
1. The survey was conducted by mail, which is unusual. The only other mail-based poll that I’m aware of is that conducted by the Columbus Dispatch, which was associated with an average error of about 7 percentage points — the highest of any pollster that we tested.
2. At least one of the questions is blatantly biased: “Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and th quality of care will be better?”. Holy run-on-sentence, Batman? A pollster who asks a question like this one is not intending to be objective.
3. As we learned during the Presidntial campaign — when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 — the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they’re doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don’t trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you’d think.
4. They say, somewhat ambiguously: “Responses are still coming in.” This is also highly unorthodox. Professional pollsters generally do not report results before the survey period is compete.
5. There is virtually no disclosure about methodology. For example, IBD doesn’t bother to define the term “practicing physician”, which could mean almost anything. Nor do they explain how their randomization procedure worked, provide the entire question battery, or anything like that.
My advice would be to completely ignore this poll. There are pollsters out there that have an agenda but are highly competent, and there are pollsters that are nonpartisan but not particularly skilled. Rarely, however, do you find the whole package: that special pollster which is both biased and inept. IBD/TIPP is one of the few exceptions.
http://tinyurl.com/og5fkv

know why i love fivethirtyeight? they use real logic and quality polling techniques. results from mail-based polls suck, just like this one.
once again, thanks julie.

A website with links to multiple medical associations opinions on health care initiatives:
September 8, 2009
Organized Medicine on Reform
“Welcome to the blog. To make this a bit easier for everyone, here are the physician organizations FOR either HB 3200 or something close to it: AMA, AOA, ACP, AAFP, ACOG, ACS, AAP, ACC, AGA, ASCO, and SHM.”
http://tinyurl.com/mkzr7p

the comment from fivethirtyeight.com is excellent in describing some of the problems with the ibd poll… please check out this survey from the robert wood johnson foundation instead… please note the complete description of their methodology and work… their finding is that over 70% of doctors prefer a public option or public only healthcare system… this comment is not just for readers, but also for the Ms. McGinty… i too am a reformed christian… ordained deacon of pca church… and we should be accountable for the words we speak… the “proof” you cite is highly questionable and, at a minimum, you should note that there are highly differing poll results on these issues… and more often than not, you should look into the methodology and reliability behind what is being cited… thank you all…

sorry… i forgot the link… here it is…
also… please watch the language being used… Ms. McGinty, you talk about healthcare being “nationalized”… not by any reasonable definition is this happening…
a “nationalized” healthcare system can only reasonably be defined as a government run system (like britain) or, less reasonable but still arguable, a single-payer system (like canada)… the healthcare reform being proposed is completely unlike either of those… our system completely keeps in place the private insurance system, and at the most would propose a government insurance option only available to uninsured people who are unemployed, self-employed, or employed in very small businesses…the CBO has estimated such an option would insure less than 10 million people
the concern of a doctor shortage and the need, in particular, for more primary care physicians is a genuine concern… but lazily hyping the problem is not helpful to a sincere debate…
also, is a shortage of doctors a legitimate reason to continue the status quo of our woefully lacking healthcare system (excludes too many people, leaves too many uninsured and growing numbers, healthcare costs growing exponentially and keeping wages down)?
a potential doctor shortage is a legitimate concern… how do we solve the problem in the context of actually reforming healthcare as opposed to just allowing the current problems to continue to grow?

i forgot the link again… i’m an idiot… sorry guys

ok… i am new to this blog and i was hopeful.. a political blog claiming to look through a reformed perspective…
but i’m sad to say that i’m leaving already… reviewing past posts, i don’t see any reasoned discussion of the issues by the author… only scare stories, hyping potential problems of healthcare reform, assumptions that propose reform is really just stealth single payer…
i’m sorely disappointed… i was hopeful that a real reformed perspective would be filled with an attitude of grace, for those who agree and for those who disagree… of fully explained and systematic logic… for engaging in sincere discussion over likely problems and potential solutions…
instead i see more fear-mongering and ideological declarations… this makes me very sad…
can someone please email me when the tone and attitude of this blog changes?

a reformed perspective of the current healthcare debate cannot truly claim to be christian without some measure of concern and sympathy being regularly shown and regularly considered for those who are currently suffering from the current healthcare debate…
are the currently proposed healthcare plans perfect? no, of course not… but reasoned discussion with consideration for those who need our help please…
all i see is demagoguing and fear-mongering… this is a sincere plea for change… let us represent Christ and the reformed faith well…

Maybe the docs will flee to Canada…

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112818960
This is a flat out LIE! Most doctors support the “public option” that allows people access to health care.

Here is an artcile saying that at least 62.9% of the doctors polled said they preferred a public option.
http://healthcare-economist.com/2009/09/15/physicians-prefer-a-mixed-public-private-healthcare-system/
And here’s a link to that leftie rag, the New England Journal of Medicine, which offers further analysis
http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=1790&query=home
More of those darned inconvenient facts…

mtnoflbc – “a reformed perspective of the current healthcare debate cannot truly claim to be christian without some measure of concern and sympathy being regularly shown and regularly considered for those who are currently suffering from the current healthcare debate”
Thank you for demonstrating that Michele does not reflect the beliefs of all individuals of reformed theology. Michele’s blog frequently gives all Christians a black eye. Others have tried your “sincere plea for change” to no avail.
Michele has used certain Bible verses to support her actions, while ignoring many others that do not support her actions. She recently used Romans 8:1 to justify that she does not have to fear her meeting with Jesus. She consistently presents an attitude that she is on a level above everyone else.
Another individual that disgraces all Christians and reformed in particular is Les Prouty -
http://reformationfaithtoday.com/
The tone of Michele’s blog is not likely to change. Facts and logic do not affect Michele. My purpose for complementing is to provide rebuttal to her false, misleading, fear mongering, or non-Christian statements.

Oh, praise Lord Lucifer! Michelle’s lies are praise to Our Lord. Who isn’t the One you silly Christians think. Thank you, Michelle!

mtnoflbc, don’t wait around. after visiting here for years, the tone and attitude of the blog host has never changed.
however, in this vacuum of reformed perspective, i encourage you to provide your point of view with an attitude of grace. it could do much to heal the opinions that people here have formed of reformed christians, including my own.

Julie, thanks for the plug. I invite you all to come over to the blog and comment and have some fun.
As to this post, I came across a post today which may get to the heart of the problem. Link to follow.

“a 2006 survey finding that as many as half of all physicians have either stopped accepting new Medicaid patients or limited the number they’ll see because reimbursements are so low.”

Then the IBD poll is cited. But don’t stop reading. This guy makes some sense (pun).

The costliness of health care rests largely on the fact that its provision became brokered long ago by insurance companies. We buy “coverage” from insurance companies instead of medical care from providers. The insurance company is intermediate between the consumer and the provider. Unlike say, stock brokerages, which have to compete with each other for consumers and so lower both costs and price, health insurance companies operate in monopolistic fashion. The competition between health-insurance companies is so low that there are no competitive pressures to reduce price, only internal costs. The result? Lower reimbursements to providers and higher premiums to consumers.
We have almost a doubling effect of price controls in play here. First, the government, command rations medical care by controlling the prices its insurance programs will pay, especially Medicaid but also Medicare. Then we have health-insurance companies effectively price controlling medical care because they often, if not usually, tell doctors that they won’t pay more (or much more) than the Medicare rate. As Healthsymphony.com puts it, Medicare is such an important part of the health-care economy “because of the precedence set by its claims payment practices.”
The inevitable result of price controls, no matter by what mechanism implemented, is shortage of the price-controlled good or service. That doesn’t mean that the service is scarcer, that is, physically rarer. Medicaid’s low payments schedules have not reduced the total number of doctors. It has produced a shortage of medical care available to patients by halving the number of doctors who will accept Medicaid payments.
The distinction between scarcity and shortage of is crucial to think through reforming health care. Presently, we have shortages of care (not uniform shortages across the country or across all medical disciplines) because of:
• price controls by Medicare and Medicaid and
• second-level price controls by health-insurance companies that follows the precedence set by Medicare.
Shortages are phenomena of prices. When prices paid by consumers (and insurance programs are the actual consumers in America, not you and me) are not synchronized with costs of providers, then you get things like a shortage of Medicaid-providing doctors even though there is no scarcity of doctors.
Well, there may be no supply-scarcity doctors who could treat Medicaid patients but that doesn’t mean that there’s not an overall scarcity of doctors. The NYT’s John Tierney reports,
The A.M.A. may be one of the most trusted voices by the public in the health-care debate, but some economists argue that it helps perpetuates one of the largest problems with the American system: a cartel that limits the number of doctors. Mark J. Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, argues that “we would probably go a long way to solving our ‘health care crisis’” if the “medical cartel” hadn’t prevented medical schools from expanding to meet students’ demands for more places. … whereas medical schools shrunk instead. As a result, their rejection rates rose, frustrating students who wanted to be doctors. The result was fewer doctors to care for the growing population… .
Ms. [Shikha] Dalmia, a senior analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation, says “that the net effect of A.M.A.-type restrictions hasn’t been to make better quality doctors available to more people, but to reduce existing options, especially in rural and other under-served areas.” She concludes:
Obama and his fellow Democrats blame the current health care mess on the free market. But a free market can’t exist when a cartel with the ear of the government is allowed to control a key input for its own self-aggrandizement. If the president is serious about lowering health care costs instead of advancing an ideologically driven government takeover of the industry, he should be doing everything in his power to disband it–not cozy up to it.
But that’s not all – we also have a supply scarcity of private health-insurance companies, even though there are more than 1,000 such companies operating in the country today. The reason is that health-insurance companies are restricted from operating across state lines. So there is a supply scarcity of insurance put into effect by law.
The upshot of this hodgepodge is:
• patients are not the real medical-care consumers, insurance companies are.
• market corrections relative to supply, demand, price and costs simply do not occur. Instead, we have rationing by government price mandates, amplified by private insurors.
• Non-competition by insurance companies for premium-paying patients means that patients are basically caught in monopoly markets and have no recourse to rising premiums except to pay them or reduce coverage.
• Supply scarcity means that doctors don’t compete, either. Instead patients have reduced choices of doctors except in a small number of locations. The number one question patients have to ask before selecting a doctor is neither how good the doctor is nor what are his prices, but whether s/he accepts the patient’s insurance plan.
• Supply scarcity also means that patients pay non-financial prices for medical care. Stories are legion of lengthy waiting times in doctors’ offices for scheduled appointments and long waiting time to get an appointment in the first place. (For some reason, though, I rarely have waited more than 15 minutes past my appointment time to see my own doctor. Seems to be a very competently-run office.)

Check it out.
http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2009/09/doctor-shortages-and-health-care-price.html

Well Michele, you’ve received considerable response, including some pretty detailed, and not very complimentary, analysis of the pollng techniques of the organization whose work you chose to quote.
You seemed unaware of the poll showing an overwhelming majority of physicians actually endorsing a pan that offers both a private and public option.
Do wish to offer an equally detailed critique of that poll?
I would suggest that you not resort to claiming an anti-physician bias or ignorance of the current medical system, given that over 5700 doctors made up the polling gample. And I’m betting a fair number of them were Republicans and would be more than a little insulted by being dismissed as “lefties.”
How do you respond to the doctors?

And many doctors have left medicine because they were fed up with fighting the insurance companies. Fighting to get payment, fighting to get the health care treatments needed for their patients, and fighting to get through all the mounds of paper work. I question those who proclaim themselves “christians’ yet side with corporations and their need to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives. It just seems so un-Jesus of them to hold that opinion.

Ederlore:
“I question those who proclaim themselves “christians’ yet side with corporations and their need to make huge profits at the expense of people’s lives.”
I agree 100% with you on that.

Michele raised a “straw man” by citing a poorly constructed poll that used as its premise a total nationalization of the health care system, which NO ONE is proposing.
She has yet to comment on a survey by the New England Journal of Medicine (surely a leftist propaganda organ, if there ever was one) which shows that 63% of the 5700 doctors polled stated that they preferred a system that offered both a private and public insurance option.
I invited her to respond, but I see she has just moved on, without dealing with the facts. Apparently, they were too inconvenient.

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