Hunter Baker examines the push for the “public option” — the creation of a government backed insurance system — as part of health care reform in his commentary. Baker takes an interesting approach at examining the push for a public option by dropping his readers into the life of a doctor, articulating the stress and sacrifice of the job:
Imagine that you are a physician. You have made it through four years of college on a steady diet of biology, chemistry, and calculus, four years of medical school so demanding that you have no life outside of school, and at least three years of residency in which you have regularly worked 100 hours a week for a very low salary. You have been the first to get up and the last to go home. And somewhere in there your third decade of life, commonly known as your “twenties” (normally a fun time), has disappeared. Along the way, you have probably racked up an astronomical personal debt because there is no time to work a second job to help pay it off. The first professional hurdle you set out to clear will be six figures accumulating interest. Forget family. If you have a spouse at this point, he or she is probably full of resentment at never seeing you.
After all this, have you made your way to an easy job? No. You are likely spending four days a week seeing patients, another day in surgery, taking a 24 hour call every four days, and working one weekend out of every four. The only time you are ever off is when another doctor can be found to cover your responsibilities while you are out. The job itself is rewarding, but incredibly difficult.
Furthermore, Baker addresses the argument that a public option is basically the same thing as Medicare, and demonstrates just because we already have Medicare does not mean that we should have a public option. Taking it a step further, Baker points out the flaws of Medicare and parallels this flaws to those that may occur under a public option:
Why the big protest? Doesn’t Medicare do the same thing? Doesn’t Medicare dictate prices? It does, but it works for one reason. Medicare is essentially parasitic on a functioning free market for medical services. Doctors are willing to accept low compensation at the margins because they do want to help people and programs like Medicare help them pay the cost of treatment for those who can’t pay. But if the whole market became like Medicare, the economic freedom of doctors would disappear. And that is the problem with an open-door public option that could expand to envelop the practice of medicine.
