Support grows in U.S. for a national health plan

The doctor has some good points...and to it all comes back around to getting the bill paid...which is what we all want...health care without the red tape or someone making a decision on the patient's behalf of whether or not we can receive care when we need it..BD 

The American Medical Association we used to know - stiff-necked, open only to old ideas and reactionary - is not the American Medical Association of today. Once it was opposed to any government health care, especially Medicare, and it sought to limit its benefits. Now it has become one of Medicare's biggest boosters. I'll bet if you asked your doctor or any of the medical professionals you deal with, they would support a national health plan such as Medicare for All over private insurance. Doctors' practices may have gone corporate, but most of them know what constitutes good care. Indeed, more than 15,000 physicians and the nation's leading medical journals have endorsed such a plan.

"Medicare was once a paragon of simplicity. ... There were a lot of regulations ... but if patients and doctors played within the rules - and there was only one set of rules - Medicare paid the bills quickly and efficiently ... with low administrative costs.... But it did not allow for the relentless demographics of our aging society."

As a result, he wrote, as the aging population grew, Congress seemed "shocked, shocked," at growing budgets and rather than allow for the growth, lawmakers took to cutting benefits and funding and introducing privatization, such as Medicare HMOs, and the present Medicare Advantage plans - which Wolfson called "ludicrous" because they only complicated the care of patients and the work of physicians.

Support grows in U.S. for a national health plan -- Newsday.com