Doctors' group endorses single-payer system
A national group of doctors specializing in internal medicine has endorsed a single-payer model of national health insurance as a way to provide universal coverage, the group announced today.
The 124,000-member American College of Physicians has backed universal coverage since 1990. In 2002, it proposed paying for it with what it called a “pluralistic” combination of public and private sources. Now the group is calling for a single-payer program financed by the federal government.
“There’s really only one choice for universal health care at a cost we can afford, and that’s single-payer, Medicare for All,” Dr. Marcia Angell, a member of ACP and a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview. “The pluralistic alternative is no way to controls costs. It simply doesn’t work.”
The former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine has advocated a single-payer system for “a long, long, time,” she said.
“My time may finally be coming.”
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Elizabeth Cooney is a former
health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a
business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical
books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
I have had a chance to talk with people in other countries in which a single payer system exists. I have not found any who believe that their system acts to improve the quality and safety of health care delivery and thereby improve efficiency. Instead "costs" are controlled mainly by the level of government appropriations. When that level of appropriations is insufficient to meet the public's demand for medical services, one of two results emerge: (1) rationing and/or (2) creation of a parallel private system of doctors and insurers who provide the services demanded by the public.