The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization focusing on improving health care, has released a new survey: Physician Views on the Public Health Insurance Option and Medicare Expansions. The survey reflects what authors Salomeh Keyhani, MD, MPH and Alex Federman, MD, MPH, call physicians' "influential roles in shaping health policy" in the U.S.

The data collected in 2009 from a random sample of 5,157 physicians from the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile asked if the respondents preferred both public and private options; private options only; or public option only. The majority of physicians in the survey, 62.9%, supported the public and private option combination. Next most popular was the private-only coverage option at 27.3%, and 9.6% supported a public-only coverage option. The support for a public option inclusion was across all demographic characteristics, specialties, practice locations (urban or rural) and practice types.

The survey did note that primary care physicians supported a public option (65.2%) somewhat more than other groups of physicians with less frequent patient contact, including radiology, anesthesiology, and nuclear medicine. In the report's discussion, the authors found that the respondents expressed little difference between private insurance and Medicare in physician autonomy and obtaining patient care. The physicians did not feel overall that Medicare interfered with medical decision-making.

In the other issue covered by the survey--expansion of Medicare coverage, the results found 58.3% of physicians support Medicare expansions to those individuals 55 to 64 years old. The support for expansion was found to be consistent across the four specialty groups included: Primary Care Providers, Medical Specialists and Subspecialists, Surgeons Surgical/Subspecialists, and Other Specialists.

Although the responding physicians have support for both Medicare expansions and for a public health insurance option similar to Medicare, they still expressed strong preference for private plans to Medicare in three particular areas: adequacy of payments (62%); amount of paperwork and administrative difficulties (33%); and timeliness of reimbursements (31.9%).

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey can be accessed at: http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/48408physician.pdf

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