Just try to remember: The AMA only represents a mere percentage of doctors. More doctors want single payer than don't. In the meantime, more on the proposed reform from Kathleen Sebelius:
As debate gets under way over Obama's initiative to revamp health care, Republican opposition has centered on one of the key pillars of the president's proposal: the so-called public option — a publicly funded insurance plan that would likely compete against private insurers.
A public health insurance plan, Sebelius said, will put pressure on private insurers to keep costs competitive. "And that's a good thing," she says. "I think that's a good thing for the American public. Medicare right now has lower overhead costs than private insurers."
Republicans argue that upward of 100 million Americans would opt out of private insurance in favor of a public plan if such a plan were available. That figure comes from a study by the Lewin Group, a consulting group owned by Ingenix, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, but it is a selective representation of the study's findings.
Big surprise there, huh!
"The whole idea of the public option has been difficult, in part, because some of the opposition has described it as a potential for a, you know, draconian scenario that was never part of the discussion in the first place," Sebelius says. "So, disabusing people of what is not going to happen is often difficult, because there's no tangible way to do that."
