Obama's Date With The Doctors

Perhaps no meeting of the American Medical Association, at least not in recent memory, has attracted more public attention than this one. The powerful doctors' group has set the stage for a major speech Monday from President Obama at their Chicago convention by coming out against the creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan.

Health services, says the A.M.A., should be "provided by private markets, as they are currently." That's a challenge for Democratic lawmakers, many of whom support a so-called "public option" for health insurance in varying degrees: either as a form of insurance competing with private insurers, or, on a larger scale, as national health insurance. Then there's the proposal from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), in which nonprofit health insurance cooperatives – independent of the government – could be created by groups of residents and small businesses.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says a bill "will not come out of the House without a public option." Even beyond the details of how to make health care available to more Americans, and how to pay for that expansion, there's another debate underway: what to do about escalating health care costs. At the same time, some raise questions about expanding the government role in health care and whether there aren't other ways of controlling costs.

It's a complicated issue, with statistics showing we don't get good overall results for our money, and others – attracting attention at the White House – revealing tremendous regional differences in cost.

That's led to proposals shifting money from high cost areas to help patients in low cost areas. Click here to learn more about public opinion on this issue, and for a look at the different approaches to health care reform, see our Citizen's Survival Kit.