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Poll: Doctors back health care public option

Posted Sep 16, 2009 by William March

Updated Sep 16, 2009 at 10:21 AM

It’s not getting much attention, but a national poll of doctors done by two medical researchers and published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests the nation’s physicians support a health care reform plan including a “public option” for coverage.

The poll was done by Salomeh Keyhani and Alex Federman of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

One caveat – it was a “voluntary response” poll, meaning the researchers sent questionnaires to doctors, who could respond or not if they chose. Pollsters consider that technique less valid than random sample polls, because whether people respond could depend on their views. The researchers, however, said there was no difference between the professional and demographic characteristics of those who responded and those who didn’t.

The researchers sent questions to about 5,000 physicians from a random sample obtained from the American Medical Association, of whom 2,130 returned the surveys.

The findings, available here, were that 63 percent support a health care system including both public and private options for health care coverage.

Another 10 percent support a system including a public option only – a so-called “single payer” public health care plan, while 27 percent prefer a health care system with private insurance options only.

Primary care doctors, those in the Northeast, and those who don’t own their own practices were the ones most likely to support a public option plan, but all categories of physicians in the survey provided majorities in favor.

The authors of the survey said publicity about views of doctors on the subject has been mostly in the form of positions taken by physicians’ professional groups, who were more likely to oppose a public option than individual physicians are.

The American Medical Association, however, has signalled it is willing to accept a public option.