their cost of living won't just disappear just because they no longer have their own practices.

Why won't they have their own practices? How on earth do you think medicine runs in my country? Of course doctors have their own practices. Or put it the other way, of course patients have their own doctors.

I really do get the impression that the kind of system that you are objecting to, John, must have been dreamed up by people who are trying to sabotage universal health care in the States. Is this system you are on about actually really proposed, or is it black propaganda, maybe put out by the big insurance companies?

If it's real, it would hardly be difficult to come up with a system that wouldn't have those kind of drawbacks - just look around to countries which have been running systems like that for decades. And that's the way to oppose it, not trying to defend a totally absurd system that happens to have grown up in the absence of something better.

"they no longer have their own practices." Weird!!