Sixty Per Cent of Physicians Surveyed Oppose Switching to a National Health Care Plan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) April 17, 2008 --

You may have recently heard the breathless reporting concerning a recent survey of physicians in which they were purportedly asked if they favored a switch to a national health care plan. The story was first reported by Reuters on March 31st and was subsequently picked up by all of the major news media. The leading line of the Reuters story is “More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan,” and that line has been faithfully repeated by every medium from MSNBC to ScienceDaily. Dr. Ackerman and Dr. Carroll are the authors of the Annals of Internal Medicine article and the survey upon which the Reuters report is supposedly based, and it is apparent that both Ackerman and Carroll are quite satisfied with this oft-repeated Reuters report even though their survey never actually asked the physicians if they favored switching to a national health care plan.

My first reaction upon hearing the story was to question why anybody would care about the results of such an absurd survey of physicians. The opinion of the physician in this discussion is only important inasmuch as the physician is a taxpayer just like me. If anything, the physician's opinion should be discounted in this discussion because the physician has a vested interest and his opinion is biased. In a democracy, public policy is decided by the body politic as a whole, not by an oligarchy of egotistical , spoiled brats who just happen to have the letters “M” and “D” after their names. I am certain that if I were to survey a large number of Internet bloggers and ask them if they would be interested in guaranteed government payments for their work regardless of the quality of the drivel that they slung into cyberspace, a large percentage of them would express a great deal of interest.

As often happens, my second reaction followed my first reaction, and my second reaction to the reports of this survey was that someone, somewhere was lying. Nothing in my twenty years of experience working with hundreds of physicians from all parts of the country and all parts of the world would lead me to believe that a majority of United States physicians would favor switching to a national health care plan. My second reaction was validated by my research and I discovered that the someone who is lying is actually two people: the duplicitous Dr. Ackerman and the duplicitous Dr. Carroll.

In order to fully understand the duplicity of these two confidence men with degrees, one should first know that the current physician survey upon which the Reuters report is based is the second such survey conducted by the esteemed doctors. One of the stated objectives of the current survey is “To determine whether physician opinion has changed in the 5 years since the 2002 survey.” Indeed, some media reports went so far as to say that Ackerman's and Carroll's two surveys indicated that 80,000 physicians had changed their minds about switching to a national health care plan in the past five years. Drs. Ackerman and Carroll need to answer a pressing question: How can they legitimately compare the results of the two surveys when they did not ask the same questions in both surveys?

In the first physician survey that the lying doctors conducted in 2002, the results of which were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they asked physicians two questions: 1.) In principle, do you support or oppose governmental legislation to establish national health insurance? and 2.) Do you support or oppose a national health insurance plan where all health care is paid for by the federal government? (Note: The underlines under the words “paid for” are actually on the questionnaire and not added by me) In the 2007 survey the first question was identical, but the second question was changed drastically to “Do you support achieving universal coverage through more incremental reform?” The survey questions are dramatically different, and yet Ackerman and Carroll want to compare their results. I can only surmise that the doctors were allowed a special dispensation by all of the scientists and the mathematicians of the world and were permitted to temporarily suspend the axioms of logic that we were all taught in elementary school, and that now the two of them can confidently compare apples and oranges and declare them to be identical.

Of greater significance than the illogical comparison between the two surveys is the actual motivation behind the change of question two. Ackerman and Carroll were apparently unhappy with the responses to question two in the first survey. In responding to the question “Do you support or oppose a national health insurance plan where all health care is paid for by the federal government?” 60 percent of the responding physicians opposed the idea, with 33 percent strongly opposing it and 27 percent generally opposing it. Only 26 percent of the respondents supported the idea of health care being paid for by the federal government.

I am certain that Ackerman and Carroll were astounded by the negative responses to question two in the 2002 survey, and it is easy to understand why. I have searched high and low and far and wide, and I can find absolutely no record of these two having ever practiced medicine. They may have had physician practices at one time, but if they did, it was a long time ago. Our two con-men are merely academicians and not real doctors. As academicians, Ackerman and Carroll are surrounded by numerous other academicians, i.e., people who do not live in the real world. As academicians, Ackerman and Carroll fell into the trap of believing that all intelligent people, i.e., doctors, would believe the same socialistic garbage that they and their colleagues preach to their students every day at Indiana University. So in order to avoid such a negative response to a survey that is clearly designed to convince the unwashed masses that government-controlled health care is wanted by their physicians, our fine doctors did what any good propaganda minister would do: They changed the question.

Changing question two on the survey was not the only effort at deception in the survey and the resulting Reuters report. The Reuters report, with the tacit approval of Quackerman (I just had to change his name – it is such an easy target) and partner, reported that more than half of U.S. physicians favored “switching” to a national health care plan. But no where in the survey were the doctors actually asked if they favored switching. The question that is asked of the physicians in both the 2002 and the 2007 survey is “Do you support or oppose legislation to establish national health insurance?” The doctors who stated that they supported such legislation could have varying ideas about the scope and funding of the theoretical national health insurance. They may have been merely supporting a change from the various state-run Medicaid programs to a similar federally-run program. They may have been expressing a mere sentiment that all children should have health insurance. Because of the broad nature of the question, we can not be certain of the opinions of the respondents. But the results of the 2002 survey provide us with absolute certainty that the physicians were not expressing support for switching to a federally-funded national health insurance plan, because when they were asked specifically if they supported such a switch, 60 percent of the physicians opposed it.

Quackerman and Carroll, in an effort to deceive, asked a very broad question in their survey and then, with the complicity of Reuters, reported it as though they had asked a very specific question. If Quackerman and Carroll really wanted to know the opinion of the surveyed physicians, they could have asked the following question: “Do you support or oppose legislation to eliminate all HMOs, PPOs, and for-profit health insurance companies and to force all citizens to switch to a federally-funded health insurance?” If such a question were asked, then maybe the results of the survey would be of some value.

Because the bias of the two socialist survey-takers is so blatantly obvious, one begins to question not only the validity of the survey questions themselves, but the methods employed in taking the survey. For example, I question why Quackerman and Carroll decided to throw out the 197 surveys completed by physicians who are no longer in practice. Are we to believe that the opinion of a retired surgeon is of no value in this survey? If the non-practicing physician's opinion has no value in this discussion, then why are we listening to Quackerman and Carroll about anything? Additionally, I would love to hear from any trained statistician who could take a look at the survey results and make a determination as to whether the numbers that the socialists provide in their article might be manipulated. Do the numbers fall into the “95% confidence, 2% margin of error” category just a little bit too neatly? I do not know whether they do or not, but I am very suspicious of anything that these two propagandists might do.

We can all agree that we are facing many monumental challenges concerning funding our health care system in the United States. We can also agree that the free flow of valid ideas and facts will assist us in meeting the coming challenges. I am even willing to listen to ideas presented by two socialist professors from Indiana University. But we must always be careful to separate the valid ideas from the propaganda. Quackerman and Carroll should go sell their socialistic propaganda elsewhere. The American average Joe is not buying it.

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