Dr. Matt Hahn is a popular family doctor.

He lives in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

And practices across the Potomac River in Hancock, Maryland.

Like most doctors in America, Dr. Hahn supports a single payer national health insurance system.

He supports it, he says, because of the suffering he sees every day in his practice.

“I support single payer because day in day out I see people, my patients suffering — suffering to the point of being harmed and even dying at the hands of our health care system,” Dr. Hahn told Single Payer Action last week.

“A woman came to my practice about a year and a half ago,” Dr. Hahn said. “She complained about abdominal pain. We needed to get a CAT scan to try and diagnose what might be going on with her. She could not afford it. She came back six months later with the same complaint and again she asked for a CAT scan. She could not get it.”

“She came back in October again with abdominal pain and had lost weight. She was able to afford the CAT scan which showed she had advanced abdominal cancer. And she died the next month. That is our health care system today.”

One reason Hahn is so popular in the tri-state area — Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland — is because he is responsive to his patients.

But he says the incentives built into the current health care system push doctors not to be caring, but to make money.

He wants to replace the currency of the dollar with the currency of caring.

“I’ve been practicing coming up on 10 years and I have watched as we have moved farther and farther from a system that cares for people towards a system that only cares about money,” Dr. Hahn said.