Forty-six percent of doctors give President Obama’s healthcare law a “D” or an “F,” according to a new survey from the Physicians Foundation. In contrast, just 25 percent of those surveyed gave the law an “A” or a “B.”
The findings come from a survey that was emailed to “virtually every physician in the United States with an email address on record with the American Medical Association” this March through June as the law’s major provisions were taking effect, and received more than 20,000 responses from doctors.
In their comments that were included (but kept anonymous) in the report, a number of doctors complained about the vast amount of bureaucracy that has been added to the medical profession.
“Get government OUT of healthcare,” one doctor wrote.
Another wrote, “Repeal Obamacare.”
Another comment read, “I’m a Canadian physician practicing in the United States. The politicians and policy makers need to understand that government involvement in healthcare never works.”
One argued that “health reform would be better served by removing many thousands of pages of laws and bureaucrats rather than adding many thousands of pages of laws and bureaucrats.”
Several doctors said they were planning to leave the profession, though it wasn’t clear that it was necessarily due to the law.
“The system is broken and I am out of here as soon as I can. I am tired of being used, abused and lied to. Has anyone here woken up to the fact that we are always the last ones to be considered in the equation of change?” one asked.
Not all doctors quoted were opposed to the government playing a larger role in health care, as several expressed a desire for a single-payer system.
“We need a single payer system that provides better coordination of care, reduces overhead and management costs, reduces complexity of reimbursements, provides a single formulary,” the doctor wrote. “We also need federal tort reform to reduce the cost of medicine.”
© 2014 by the Washington Examiner. Reprinted with permission.