Doctors’ Group Asks All-Public Health Coverage

Declaring “our health care system is failing,” a national physicians’ group today proposed a comprehensive health plan that would abolish private insurance but still guarantee medical care for every American.

In news conferences around the country and in an article published in tomorrow’s editions of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors from Physicians for a National Health Program, a 1,200-member physicians’ group, made their case for a fundamental change in the way medical bills are paid.

At UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, Dr. Howard Waitzkin, an internist and a founding member of PNHP, cited recent national surveys showing that there are now 35 million Americans with no insurance and another 20 million who are “under-insured,” with coverage that does not pay for all their medical needs.

“As practicing doctors, teachers and researchers we’re deeply troubled that many people can’t get the most basic health services,” Waitzkin said. “That has got to change.” Agreed Dr. Jerome Tobis a UCI professor who chairs the Medical School’s bioethics committee: “The health care system today in America is a jungle and correction is urgently needed.”

Modeled on Canada’s Plan

PNHP’s solution is a plan, patterned after Canada’s 20-year-old national health insurance program, that proponents say would cut bureaucracy, do away with the “often unjust dictates of insurance companies” and save up to $50 billion annually, but still allow patients to choose doctors, clinics and hospitals.

Instead of paying premiums to insurance companies, individuals under the plan would be taxed, paying an amount roughly equivalent to their premium into the new National Health Program. Most employers would expect to pay slightly less than they are now paying for health insurance benefits, proponents said.

As Waitzkin and the medical journal article described it, patients would not be billed for any medical service. Rather all medical costs would be paid directly to providers through the federal program.