Minnesota docs prefer single-payer

Impressively, 63.4 percent of Minnesota physicians said a single-payer healthcare system would offer the best healthcare to the greatest number of people. That's quite a few more than the 25 percent of physicians who thought health savings account systems were best, or the 11.8 percent who were in favor of managed care.

It's not the best study in the world — the University of Minnesota mailed out a thousand questionnaires to randomly chosen Minnesota physicians, got 39 percent back and called it good — but you can't really say that pro-single-payer doctors would be more likely to mail it back than other docs. They'd be more likely to mail it back than doctors who didn't know or didn't care, but it's probably actually the anti-single-payer physicians who would be most anxious to get the survey in.

The tide's not moving in their direction, after all.