The physicians, all invited guests, were told to bring their white lab coats to make sure that TV cameras captured the image.

But some docs apparently forgot, failing to meet the White House dress code by showing up in business suits or dresses.

So the White House rustled up white coats for them and handed them to the suited physicians who had taken seats in the sun-splashed lawn area.

All this to provide a visual counter to complaints from other doctors that pending legislation is bad news for the medical profession.

"Nobody has more credibility with the American people on this issue than you do," Obama told his guests

TWO-thirds of doctors "oppose the proposed health-care plan," reports an Investors Busi ness Daily/TIPP poll. Almost half would "consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if "Congress passes its health-care plan." Many of my colleagues feel like we're already struggling -- nor are we prepared to take care of tens of millions more patients.

An Association of American Medical Colleges survey predicts a doctor shortage of 150,000 (at current rates of population growth) by 2025 if universal health insurance is adopted. The doctors we do have would be overwhelmed with far more patients than we could realistically take care of. We'd have to work under huge time pressures, and the service we could deliver would decline.

Those who didn't quit would have to learn to "game" the new system by seeing more patients, doing more procedures, providing less care per patient and becoming less accessible for health-choice discussions.

But the doctors in the Rose Garden were all supporters of health care reform -- and the invitation-only guest list drew heavily from Doctors for America, a grassroots organization that backs a government-run insurance option.

Roughly 98 percent of the group's 15,000 members support a public insurance option, Doctors for America spokeswoman Megan Smith told FOXNews.com. She said roughly 40 of the 150 doctors who attended the meeting were from the organization.

Originally posted by FlyersFan

TWO-thirds of doctors "oppose the proposed health-care plan," reports an Investors Busi ness Daily/TIPP poll. Almost half would "consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if "Congress passes its health-care plan." Many of my colleagues feel like we're already struggling -- nor are we prepared to take care of tens of millions more patients.

Those alarming results come from a very shady poll...

I'm flying 35,000 feet somewhere over Eastern Ohio now -- isn't technology wonderful? -- so I can only comment on this briefly, but the Investors' Business Daily poll purporting to show widespread opposition to health care reform among doctors is simply not credible. There are five reasons why:

1. The survey was conducted by mail, which is unusual. The only other mail-based poll that I'm aware of is that conducted by the Columbus Dispatch, which was associated with an average error of about 7 percentage points -- the highest of any pollster that we tested.

2. At least one of the questions is blatantly biased: "Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and th quality of care will be better?". Holy run-on-sentence, Batman? A pollster who asks a question like this one is not intending to be objective.

3. As we learned during the Presidntial campaign -- when, among other things, they had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 -- the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they're doing. I mean, literally none. For example, I don't trust IBD/TIPP to have competently selected anything resembling a random panel, which is harder to do than you'd think.

4. They say, somewhat ambiguously: "Responses are still coming in." This is also highly unorthodox. Professional pollsters generally do not report results before the survey period is compete.

5. There is virtually no disclosure about methodology. For example, IBD doesn't bother to define the term "practicing physician", which could mean almost anything. Nor do they explain how their randomization procedure worked, provide the entire question battery, or anything like that.

My advice would be to completely ignore this poll. There are pollsters out there that have an agenda but are highly competent, and there are pollsters that are nonpartisan but not particularly skilled. Rarely, however, do you find the whole package: that special pollster which is both biased and inept. IBD/TIPP is one of the few exceptions.