Demoralized U.S. doctors who are down on Obamacare, and on an increasingly burdensome bureaucracy, are giving the president's signature healthcare law mostly failing grades, says a new survey released Wednesday.
In the
Physicians Foundation poll, 46 percent of doctors surveyed give the Affordable Care Act a "D" or "F," while just 25 percent of the respondents give the new law an "A" or "B."
The foundation said the results came from 20,000 responses to an emailed survey targeting American Medical Association doctors from March through June.
Vote Now: Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance?
Their comments reflect a pessimistic prognosis for healthcare's future.
"Physicians are not uniform in their perspectives," the survey analysis noted, with younger doctors, female physicians, employed physicians and primary-care physicians "somewhat more positive" about the medical practice environment than their older, male, and specialist colleagues.
But, the survey found, "the majority of almost all groups suffer from low morale and express doubts about the direction of the healthcare system."
Thirty-nine percent of the doctors surveyed said they're planning to fast-track retirement plans because of changes in the healthcare system.
"Get government OUT of healthcare," one doctor wrote in an anonymous comment, the
Washington Examiner noted.
Another wrote, "Repeal Obamacare."
"I'm a Canadian physician practicing in the United States," yet another doctor wrote. "The politicians and policy makers need to understand that government involvement in healthcare never works."
Another physician argued that "health reform would be better served by removing many thousands of pages of laws and bureaucrats rather than adding many thousands of pages of laws and bureaucrats."
Several wrote about wanting out of the profession altogether.
"The system is broken and I am out of here as soon as I can," says one comment. "I am tired of being used, abused, and lied to. Has anyone here woken up to the fact that we are always the last ones to be considered in the equation of change?"
Yet there were doctors who said they wanted to see a single-payer system.
"We need a single-payer system that provides better coordination of care, reduces overhead and management costs, reduces complexity of reimbursements, provides a single formulary," one doctor argued.
"We also need federal tort reform to reduce the cost of medicine."
Still another doctor scolded:
"Trust doctors to do the job we are trained to do. Stop treating our profession as if we are all ex-cons who need constant monitoring lest we commit fraud or some other crime."
Vote Now: Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance?
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.