Georgia's docs in Congress influence health care debate

By Bob Keefe


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Before he went to Congress in 2002, Rep. Phil Gingrey of Marietta delivered more than 5,200 babies. Rep. Tom Price of Roswell performed orthopedic surgery on broken hips and twisted knees. Rep. Paul Broun of Athens attended to runny noses and made house calls as a general practitioner. Rep. John Linder of Duluth filled cavities as a dentist.

As Congress considers massive health care reform legislation that would change the way we all get our medical care, Georgia’s delegation of doctors and dentists — all Republicans — brings a unique and rising voice to the escalating debate.

In all there are 16 doctors in the U.S. House and Senate — 11 Republicans and five Democrats — and no other state has as many doctors in Congress as Georgia. “Hopefully what it means is that we bring a perspective and knowledge of caring for patients that others don’t have,” Price said. “So many of the decisions are being made today by people who don’t have a clue about caring for patients.”

While Georgia doctors share a background as medical practitioners, they also share a common political persuasion — one that influences their thoughts on health care reform perhaps just as much.

As former doctors, all of them acknowledge that the nation’s health care system could use some fixing. As Republicans, all say the plan being pushed by Democrats will expand government bureaucracy, hurt small businesses, drive up medical costs and change America for the worse.

Their biggest complaints echo those of the Republican Party leadership. They’re all vehemently against tax increases to help pay for insurance for all Americans, they’re against requiring small businesses to offer health insurance for workers and, most of all, they’re against plans to create a government-run public insurance provider to compete with private companies — something Democrats say is needed to help drive down costs.

“What we’re talking about is a move toward socialism,” Gingrey said recently, sparing no hyperbole. “You’re going to have a socialist bureaucrat in the exam room between the doctor and the patient.”

Added Broun: “Government intrusion into the system is what’s causing the problems today. What the Democrats’ bill does is expands that and puts more government intrusion into the system.”

Practitioners disagree

To be sure, plenty of other medical professionals on either side of the political spectrum support the health care reform plan being pitched by congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama.

Last week, leaders of the American Nurses Association, which represents 2.9 million registered nurses, joined Obama at the White House to show their support of the Democrats’ plan.

The powerful American Medical Association has come out in support of the House Democrats’ plan, as has Doctors for America, a group of more than 13,000 physicians.

Rep. Vic Snyder, a Democrat from Arkansas who was a family practitioner, acknowledges that the bill introduced by his party still requires work. But he calls it a good — and badly needed — starting point.

With health care, “we’ve had a reckless experiment in this country ... about what happens when you don’t solve your problems,” Snyder said. “The day this bill is signed into law will be the first day of a solution to our health care problems.”

Another Democrat doctor, Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, said he strongly supports his party’s reform plan, comparing it to 1960s civil rights legislation. Instead of opening up lunch counters and buses to blacks, the new legislation will open up health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions or who can’t get insurance elsewhere.

“It ends discrimination” against patients by insurers, he said.

Kagen said he has a good relationship with Georgia’s Republican doctors. As medical practitioners, he said, “we all have the same goal — to guarantee access to everyone,” he said. “Now, we may have differences in how to get there,” he added.

Jim Marton, an associate professor at the Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Public Policy who specializes in health care policy, said politics as much as personal experience probably drives congressional doctors.

“It appears as though political support for the current reform proposals is split along party lines,” he said. “So it is not clear if the position of Republican congressmen who are also physicians can be attributed to the fact that they are physicians or if it is because they are Republicans and party unity is deemed to be critical for such a big issue.”

Gingrey, for one, says politics isn’t a factor in his opposition to Obama’s reform plans.

“One of the most disappointing things to me since I’ve been here [in Washington] is that far too often, politics trumps good policy,” he said. “But I will tell you, from my perspective, this is not about politics.”

GOP doctors’ remedies

Gingrey has been among the most active of Georgia’s delegation of doctors on health care reform. In March, he helped formed the GOP Doctors Caucus, a 13-member group he co-chairs with Rep. Tim Murphy, a psychologist from Pennsylvania.

The alternative bill Gingrey supports, authored by Republican Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, would make it easier for business and social organizations — such as alumni groups and trade associations — to create insurance pools instead of the government-run insurance alternative suggested by Democrats. People who couldn’t get health insurance through their employers could get insurance from those private pools.

Broun said he plans to introduce yet another alternative to health care reform soon. Under Broun’s plans, doctors and pharmacies would be encouraged to post prices for their services just as a restaurant might post a dinner menu. Doing so, Broun said, would spur competition and therefore help bring down costs.

Broun said government regulations outlining what types of lab work doctors could do in their offices and what kind of insurance they can accept helped prompt him in 2002 to develop a unique full-time practice of house calls instead of running a traditional doctor’s office. That gave him “the freedom of practicing medicine without bureaucratic encumbrances,” according to his office.

Likewise, Price has said one of the reasons he got into politics in the first place was because he was sick and tired of what he characterized as government meddling in his practice with programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

“As I can attest to firsthand — after nearly a quarter-century as a practicing surgeon — no one thing has had a greater negative impact on the delivery of health care and the manner in which medical services are provided than the intrusion of ... the federal government,” he said during a House committee hearing last week.

He and his former patients, Price said later, “bristle at the notion that the federal government ought to be involved in their health care.”