Physicians promote universal health care

Several prominent physicians, fed up with "market-based medicine," have banded together to advocate for single-payer national health insurance.

By Amy Snow Landa, AMNews staff. May 21, 2001.

Washington -- At a time when most discussion in Congress about reducing the number of uninsured Americans is focused on incremental steps that are considered politically viable, a coalition of 18 prominent physicians has launched a campaign to put single-payer national health insurance on lawmakers' agenda.

The nation faces a crisis in its health care system that only a single-payer national health insurance program can solve, said coalition spokeswoman Marcia Angell, MD, in testimony May 1 before members of Congress.

"We've engaged in a massive and failed experiment in market-based medicine in the U.S.," said Dr. Angell, immediate past editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and now a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School. "Rhetoric about the benefits of competition and profit-driven health care can no longer hide the reality: Our health system is in shambles."

The Physicians' Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance presented its proposal for health care reform at a hearing sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Together, the three caucuses represent about 120 Democratic members of Congress.

The working group was formed "because the panel had to hear, the public, the nation had to hear that America's doctors increasingly are for universal health care, not [trying] to block it," said the coalition's convener, Quentin Young, MD.

Dr. Young, who is the volunteer national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program and past president of the American Public Health Assn., said the group grew out of conversations he had this spring with Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D, Mich.) of the Congressional Black Caucus. [...]