Doctors, others raise their voices for public option in health care

<p>Wearing their white smocks and name tags, Santa Rosa's youngest doctors once again rallied Thursday evening at Old Courthouse Square in support of a Medicare-like health insurance program to cover millions of uninsured Americans.</p><p>The rally, the second within a week, was organized by doctors in training from the Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. It drew more than 100 participants, many of them health care professionals who said the so-called “public option” is an essential part of congressional efforts to overhaul the nation's broken health care system.</p><p>“We see people who have had liver disease for more than 20 years and only enter the health care system when they're sick enough to be hospitalized,” said Rachel Friedman, a second-year resident who helped organize the rally.</p><p>“It's part of the reason why we spend so much money on the health care system, more than any other developed nation, and don't have the health care outcomes to show for it.”</p><p>Ten of the program's 36 residents participated in the rally, which also included faculty doctors from the residency program, retired physicians and nurses and medical assistants from local hospitals.</p><p>Peter Schneider, a medical/surgical and orthopedic nurse at Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa, said the nation could be getting “a lot more health care” for the amount of money currently being spent.</p><p>“We have people who have two jobs, a husband and wife, who can't afford health care,” Schneider said. “As a great nation, we should provide health care to our citizens. It's not socialism. It's the Veterans Administration. It's Medicare. Is that socialism?”</p><p>Veronica Jordan, a third-year resident, said she sees daily evidence that health care coverage should be expanded.</p><p>Jordan, who is chief of inpatient medicine service, said three of the 18 hospitalized patients currently being cared for by residents “are about to get limbs or appendages chopped off because of uncontrolled diabetes.”</p><p>Jordan and other medical professionals at the rally said the current health care system cannot be sustained.</p>