4 Responses to “Will Doctors Quit Their Jobs If Public Health Care Is Finally Approved?”

1. 

   Metallica is God said on Thursday, August 27, 2009, 16:00

   It really depends on how the system works. Obviously, so many people are against public or universal health care, and there are some good points. However, pointing to a country above USA which has universal health care, you will see that their health care is some of the best the world has to offer. Socializing health care in the right way works! However, I’m sure many doctors in America will quit because of certain reasons here or there. I don’t think doctors may necessarily go on strike, but there will be bumps in the road. However, doctors do deserve to be paid the most in this country, because they contribute a bunch to society, and they’ve worked hard to get to where they are at. It makes no sense to punish them for hard work. In that case, work loses its value quick.
2. 

   sonnyday said on Thursday, August 27, 2009, 21:47

   A RN is not a doctor. They don’t diagnose, and they don’t prescribe. Even with a million RN’s, you would still need enough doctors on hand to keep the system running.
   Try running a hospital/clinic, with high malpractice insurance, with a large amount of medical school loans to pay back, the cost adds up really quickly.
   You pay an engineer a lot more than you would pay an electrician. You pay them more because they need are a lot more technically skilled, and they are rarer. Doctors also have a lot of responsibility, namely life and death. You have to compensate them for the stress and time that takes.
   If a lot of doctors quit, you have to pay the doctors who stay even more. Not only will they work more hours, you would need to compensate them for working so much that they see their families less than they see them now.
   The reason public health care works in the military, is because there is no malpractice, the government will often pay for your student loans, and because the doctors there are willing to make the necessary sacrifices for our fighting men and women.
3. 

   jwenting said on Friday, August 28, 2009, 3:25

   yes, many doctors will quit because they’re not about to work for free, which is essentially what they’ll end up doing under Obamacare.
   Doctors aren’t in general arogant, but they do need to feed their family and pay back the hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans they have after graduating from 10 years in university.
4. 

   Az R said on Friday, August 28, 2009, 8:57

   RNs are in no way capable of replacing a fully trained physician.
   Actually, it does not appear that either the Obama administration or the current congress is looking at creating a public health care system akin to Canada’s or the UK’s NHS. Rather, they’ve fairly accurately identified the main problem with the atrocious amount spent in the US. The chief difference is that while we actually spend a comperable amount on actual health care services – that is doctors, procedures and so on, most of the excess cost in the US healthcare system is bound up in administration of health care itself.
   Basically, as an example, I subscribe to my university’s graduate student health insurance program. Different aspects of this program have been subcontracted to a major health insurance provider. They in turn subcontracted administration of different aspects of managing that health care to yet other companies. My health insurance involves paperwork relating to no less than seven different companies or offices.
   The current approach looks more like there’s going to be an effort to limit the costs of administration – centralizing and standardizing insurance practices, rather than replacing private health insurance firms with a public system. Another effort seems to be related to electronic maintenance of patient information – to cut down on redundant testing, lack of access to patient records, and payers inability to manage their own paperwork and bureaucracy.
   There’s also some rumbling about trying to get rid of direct to consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. The US is the only developed country that allows this, and it’s largely responsible for the massive inflation of prescription costs. While there are medications that are still under patent that are necessary, patient insistence on particular brands is extremely problematic when cheaper and equally effective generics are available. How this will get through is a mystery, and in what form as it will be strongly opposed by lobbying groups – though heavily endorsed by most medical groups and major patient advocacy groups. There’s also the issue of needing to safeguard the supplies of medications so that counterfeit pills and unsafely manufactured medications do not become problematic as they have in other areas of the world.