Single-payer advocates: Keeping up the fight

Physicians working for a universal health care system won't give up despite dismal political odds.

By Geri Aston, AMNews staff. Jan. 29, 2001.

Each year 80,000 St. Louis residents filter through the nonprofit safety net health system that James Kimmey, MD, chairs. Its clients are the area's poor and uninsured.

Despite St. Louis ConnectCare's successes, there is a significant portion of the community that doesn't have access to health services, Dr. Kimmey says. They are the people who fall through the cracks, who don't want to be viewed as charity cases or are overwhelmed by the paperwork involved in enrolling in a public program.

"We see them when they have chest pains or acute respiratory episodes" -- conditions that could have been prevented with primary care, he says.

Dr. Kimmey believes the health care access problem in St. Louis and elsewhere around the nation has a solution. The answer, he says, is a national, single-payer, universal health care system.

It's been more than six years since the Clinton universal health plan failed. Washington policy-makers and lawmakers since then have turned to a step-by-step approach to expanding insurance access. Powerful lobbying groups, including the AMA, fiercely oppose the single-payer concept. Yet thousands of physicians, such as Dr. Kimmey, continue to press for it. Why?

"What keeps us going is seeing the result of not having that kind of program every day," Dr. Kimmey says.

He and physicians like him are frustrated that nearly 43 million Americans still lack health insurance and, as a result, often don't get appropriate, timely health care. On top of that, they are fed up with what they perceive as abuse at the hands of managed care companies. To them, the obvious solution is what many others consider extreme. [...]