In the second report of a weekly series on the U.S. health care system, NPR's "Morning Edition" on Monday profiled Wilmington, Del., family physician Rebecca Jaffe, who "increasingly struggles to spend quality time with her patients as disputes with insurance companies demand more of her attention." Jaffe spends a significant portion of her workdays completing paperwork and making phone calls to insurers "to fight to get her patients the care they need," NPR reports. Though many of her patients are insured, their out-of-pocket costs are rising, and some have lost coverage, according to NPR. Jaffe would favor a health care system in which all patients were guaranteed a basic level of care and providers could spend less time interacting with insurers. She said the current system is "a broken system for part of the population" and "a bumpy system for others" (Silberner, "Morning Edition," NPR, 3/26). Audio and a partial transcript of the segment are available online. The first report in the series also is available online.

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