PHILADELPHIA _ As politicians in Washington slug it out over the merits of the Affordable Care Act compared with its newly proposed replacement American Health Care Act, a group of future doctors from across the country met Saturday in Philadelphia to advocate and strategize for an altogether different health insurance option.
Most of the 200 medical students who gathered at Temple University's Lewis Katz School of Medicine building for the sixth annual summit of Students for a National Health Program said they think the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care plan, is inadequate because it leaves an estimated 26 million Americans without health insurance. As for the proposed Republican replacement, the students called it "unethical," "extremely detrimental" and "a step in the wrong direction."
So, what's the cure for America's health care problems? The answer is a single-payer system, the medical students repeated in speeches, breakout sessions and interviews during the daylong gathering.
"We're willing to take this to the halls of our medical schools, our nursing schools, the halls of Congress and the streets of our cities to say, we're not going to stand for corporate America taking over our health-care system and holding patients hostage," said Dr. Robert Bruno, a founding member of the student group who specializes in primary care and public health in Baltimore.
In extolling a single-payer health care system, Bruno noted a 2009 study by the student group's 21,000-member parent, Physicians for a National Health Program, that found that 44,000 Americans die annually because they lack of health insurance.
"Obamacare has done a lot to reduce that number, but if we repeal it and replace it with his tragedy, this new bill, we're going to go back to more and more unneeded suffering," Bruno said.
Under a single-payer system, the government would cover all citizens' health-care costs. Many industrialized countries �� including Britain, Australia and Canada �� already have such systems.
"There's a lot of data that really kind of makes it obvious that it makes the most financial sense, just comparing the amount of money we spend per person in this country to how much is spent in other developed countries," said Karim Sariahmed, a Temple University second-year medical student from Morganville, N.J.
"We're not healthier because we spend more, we're about number 37 in terms of our healthcare outcomes. So, the amount that we're spending is not going to providing quality care, it's just going to line the pockets of health insurance CEOs and non-care related things," Sariahmed said.
The medical-student group stimates that a single-payer system that improves and expands Medicare would save the nation $504 billion a year by reducing bureaucracy costs while covering all Americans.
"There are all these really great conservative arguments for single-payer because we spend up to about 19 percent of our (gross domestic product) on health care but we still have 30 million uninsured people," said Vanessa Van Doren, a Case Western Reserve University third-year medical student.
"With this Trumpcare coming out, it's going to be tens of millions more people losing their insurance. For a developed, supposedly great country, that is totally unacceptable," Van Doren said.
Critics of a single-payer system argue that such a system could result in total health care costs rising and quality of care falling because of a lack of competition that exists in the current multi-payer system.
But Janine Petito, a Boston University fourth-year medical student, said advocating for a single-payer system is part of being a good doctor.
"I think guaranteeing that someone can go see a physician when they have a medical problem without fear of bankruptcy is critically important. I think a lot of folks delay care, skip care altogether, don't get the preventive care that they need because they're afraid of not being able to pay," Petito said.
H. Matthew Moy, a 2016 graduate of the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, said the Temple gathering empowers the medical students to work toward their shared goal of changing how health care is paid for.
"When you believe that health care is a human right, the only way to adequately and efficiently provide that for everybody is through a single-payer system, which won't waste money with a middle-man insurance company telling you where you need to go," said Moy, a fellow at the Washington-based American Medical Student Association.
