Single payer bill introduced in the Senate

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has introduced a single-payer health care reform bill into the Senate. A brief excerpt from the post:

Sanders’ program would be paid for by taking the current sources of government health care spending, and combining them with modest new taxes that would be less than people now pay for insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket expenses. Four hundred billion dollars would be saved annually by eliminating insurance company profits and overhead, as well as the paperwork that burdens doctors and hospitals.

Dr. Uwe Reinhardt said at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, “We have 900 billing clerks at Duke (a 900 bed university hospital). I’m not sure we have a nurse per bed, but we have a billing clerk per bed. . . it’s obscene.”

Doctors and hospitals are sick of the paperwork and the health care dollars that don’t go for health care delivery. And everyone hates the intrusion of insurance companies into health care decisions. A poll published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 64 percent of doctors in Massachusetts now support single-payer health care.</blockquote>