A Doctor Delivers Bad News--today's LA Times.

[zalinda]

16. Part of the problem is

that emergency rooms have to make up for those who come in and can't pay. No matter how you look at it, someone has to pay for services, and if those who have no insurance have to use the emergency room for their primary physician, well those who can afford it, pay for it, whether insurance companies or private individuals. Just take a look at "Code Black" the documentary and you can see what happens in the emergency room.

What will happen with single payer is that people can then walk into any clinic and get care. You can go into what one doctor called it, 'doc in a box' and get that rash looked at or the sore throat or whatever. We also need a lot more doctors and nurses in the system, and we should be paying for their education. We should also be going in poorer communities and earmarking kids who should be encouraged to be more than their circumstances dictate what they can be. If I would have had any type of encouragement that I was smart enough, I would have loved to have become a doctor or even nurse. By the time I realize that I was smart enough to go to college, it was too late to realize that dream of an occupation.

Right now, even Medicare or Medicare is under for profit health insurance companies. I can only get what the health insurance company allows me to have. They will pay for one medication, but not another, for example, they will pay for Ibuprofen but not Tylenol, and the list goes on. It is a dance that the doctors, or rather the doctor's insurance specialists have to do to get services for their patients.

The catch phrase of medicare for all, is only that. All you would have to do is introduce a single payer option and watch people switch over. You don't need to force them to change, just give them the option. It's called incremental change, but it's change in the correct direction, not a sideways direction.

Z