By Matt Leingang
Democrat and Chronicle
(March 26, 2003) — A certain realization comes over medical students during their training, argues Corey Fehnel, a first-year medical student at the University of Rochester.
“You see how fragmented the payment system is in health care, and you realize that it’s not sustainable,” says Fehnel, 24. “There are too many questions about who has insurance, who doesn’t and how that affects quality of care.”
The solution, Fehnel argues, is a single-payer health care system for the United States, and he’ll lead a rally for it at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the UR Medical Center’s Flaum Atrium. Some veteran physicians in the Rochester community are also expected to lend their support.
Fehnel is a member of the American Medical Student Association, which has long advocated national health insurance.
Congress has remained largely deadlocked for years over how to approach reforms to the U.S. system, where costs continue to rise at more than 10 percent each year and more and more consumers find themselves unable to afford private health insurance premiums.
About 41 million Americans lack health insurance.
Patchwork reforms won’t work, Fehnel says.
The AMSA single-payer plan calls for the federal government to finance health care, but it leaves the delivery of health care to mostly private control.
Patients would have their choice of provider; physicians would no longer be constrained by a patient’s insurance status; hospital revenue would be more stable; and much of the bureaucracy needed for handling the dizzying array of private insurance plans would be eliminated.
“There’s no question, based on the Canadian experience with a single-payer system, that health care that is financed and delivered this way is far cheaper and less confusing to consumers,” says Dr. Kevin Fiscella, a family practitioner in Rochester who will attend Thursday’s rally.
The downside of a single-payer system, critics argue, is that thousands of people who work in the insurance industry would lose their jobs, and politicians would be left in control of deciding which hospitals would get funding for new technology and other capital improvements.
Questions of quality — long waits for specialty services, such as CAT scans and MRIs — also dog the Canadian system.
No system is absolutely perfect, but lessons can be learned from Canada about how the United States can develop a single-payer plan that ensures both low cost and high quality for everyone, Fiscella says.
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