The Expert Voice on Health Care Reform

If you want to know what's really going on with health care reform on the ground, among people who live it every day, you can't do better than our good friend Blue Girl.

Decades of working the trenches of emergency medicine in the military give her experience, perspective and insight almost unmatched in the blogosphere. So when Blue Girl says health care workers want single-payer, you better believe it.

There was a meeting yesterday of a House subcommittee where some important things were said by some front-line healthcare providers and medical educators, and although the important things they said were not well reported, I can sum up the testimony in five words...

Healthcare professionals want single payer.

That is because we have had a front-row seat to the horror show that is our current healthcare system and we have come to realize, some of us more quickly than others, that spiraling costs are the biggest problem we face, and the surest, fastest and most effective way to get those costs under control is to move to a single payer system. "Unless you can stop the insurance industry price gouging, we simply cannot make health care affordable, which means you either have price controls on the insurance industry or you take them out of the equation through single-payer reform," said Geri Jenkins, the co-president of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which represents 86,000 registered nurses. "If we were to have a debate on containing costs, improving quality and universality, the single-payer advantage would be clear."

Walter Tsou, a University of Pennsylvania professor who is an adviser to Physicians for a National Health Program told the panel that for the last 50 years, government policy has protected insurance industry profits at the expense of taxpayers, doctors and hospitals. "Single-payer is the only reform that can control health care costs," he said bluntly. "Our most famous radical document begins with the words, 'We the People.' Not 'We the Insurers.' It is time for our own generation's revolution."

We all know that the single payer discussion is one that we ought to be having, but politicians on every side are scared to death of it, to the point that even though we have a popular Democratic president with strong majorities in both chambers, Democratic legislators took single payer off the table early in the first round of discussions. Unsurprisingly, they regret that decision now. Oops. Probably shouldn't have done that...

SNIP

The bottom line is this: Reform is coming, whether the AMA wants to accept that fact or not, and enough people have realized that every single argument that is made against a public option fails to stand up to scrutiny, because every single negative scenario they point to, patients already have to deal with every time their doctor orders a test, writes a prescription or schedules a procedure - and enough people are independently arriving at this conclusion that 'critical mass' is imminent.

Read the whole thing, or else.