If health care is free, more people will go to the doctor and that means longer waiting for people who truly need it. An overburdened health care system would then have to hire less-qualified people to meet the needs, and that is bad.  If the president suddenly says every family will get a three star-chef, for example, they won't actually get a three-star chef, they'll get a McDonald's fry cook dressed like a chef.

Yet we spend a lot for great care.  Some contend Americans get too much health care under the current system, meaning rationing under a nationalized system would not really hurt anyone.  Who is making that claim?  Economists in favor of government health care, mostly.

Really, what US primary care physicians want is not reform of their duties but reform of their landscape.  If patients get too much care and unnecessary tests it is because no one will stand up to the malpractice industry, who portray business as evil faceless corporations hurting poor people and doctors as incompetent unless lawyers are able to sue and get rich. 

"Per capita U.S. health care spending exceeds, by a factor of two, that of the average industrialized nation and is growing at an unsustainable rate," the authors write as background information in the article. "A number of health care epidemiologists and economists, however, have suggested that a substantial amount of U.S. health care is actually unnecessary."

The authors also note that the opinions on rate of care of primary care physicians, whom they acknowledge are the "frontline of health care delivery," are unknown.

Brenda E. Sirovich, M.D., M.S., and colleagues from the VA Outcomes Group, White River Junction, Vt., and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Lebanon, N.H., conducted a national mail survey of U.S. primary care physicians identified from a random sample of the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile, between June and December 2009. Of the surveys mailed, 627 physicians participated, a response rate of 70 percent. 

Nearly half (42 percent) of all survey respondents believe that patients in their own practice receive too much medical care, while only 6 percent believe that their patients receive too little care. Just over half (52 percent) believe the amount of care received is just right. Additionally, 28 percent of respondents said they personally were practicing more aggressively than they would like, and 29 percent felt that other primary care physicians in their community were practicing too aggressively.

Forty-seven percent of respondents reported that mid-level primary care clinicians (nurse practitioners, physician assistants) practice too aggressively, and 61 percent felt that medical subspecialists practice too aggressively. Almost all physicians in the survey (95 percent) believe that primary care physicians vary in their testing and treatment of patients, and most (76 percent) were interested in learning how their own practice compared to those of other physicians.

Study participants identified three factors they believe cause physicians to practice too aggressively: malpractice concerns (76 percent), clinical performance measures (52 percent) and inadequate time to spend with patients (40 percent). Eighty-three percent of physicians felt they could easily be sued for failing to order a test that was indicated, while 21 percent felt that they could be sued for ordering a test that was not indicated.

The authors conclude that their results show that, "physicians are open to practicing more conservatively." They also note that, "physicians believe they are paid to do more and exposed to legal punishment if they do less. Reimbursement systems should encourage longer primary care physician visits and telephone, e-mail and nursing follow-up, rather than diagnostic intensity."

Archives of Internal Medicine. 2011;171[17]:1582-1585.