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Doctors For National Insurance Plan
Chances are you’ve heard media personalities and ordinary people making the case for a national insurance plan. Not long ago, during the democratic primaries, Senators Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were arguing back and forth over whose national insurance platform would benefit the nation more. Well, it turns out that now a majority of American doctors now support a nationalized insurance plan, which has changed in the last decade according to a recent study.
What Is a National Insurance Plan?
Generally speaking, national insurance plans either reduce or eliminate the role of private insurance companies and, instead, utilize a single state-run social insurance fund which guarantees coverage for everyone.
Last Year’s Physician Study
It was revealed this past year that, contrary to popular belief, fifty-nine percent of physicians support legislation to enact nationally administered insurance, while thirty-two percent oppose it and the remaining nine percent are neutral on the subject. An analogous study conducted in 2002 found that forty-nine percent supported national insurance, while forty opposed it.
The greater part of the medicine world feels that the current profit-fueled and fragmented insurance system is getting in the way of proper medical care. The increase in support spread across all of the medical specialties– especially psychiatrists, eighty-three percent of which offered their support; pediatric sub-specialists were next in line at seventy-one percent approval, sixty-nine percent of emergency medical physicians, and sixty-five percent of general pediatricians; general surgeons doubled their support from the 2002 study, now with roughly fifty-five percent supporting a national insurance plan.
About fifty million people in the U.S. are currently under-insured, and another forty-seven million have no health insurance. To make matters worse, health-care costs are increasing by seven percent each year– twice the rate of inflation. Because of these issues plaguing the United States insurance system, countless members of the medical world are growing concerned and offering their support. The largest medical specialty group in the nation at 124,000 members, the American College of Physicians, endorsed a for a single-payer national health insurance system last December.