Five days on the road, and a group of physicians from Washington, Oregon and Arizona are truly mad as hell about the nation's health-care system and the way the reform debate has shaped up.

Especially infuriating, the self-named Mad as Hell doctors said during a town-hall meeting at the Salt Lake City Library on Saturday, is President Barack Obama's apparent dismissal of a single-payer system which they say would insure every American and cost the least.

Even Obama's Wednesday night health-care speech was nothing more than "a Band-aid clinging to the edges of a gaping, stinking wound," said Salt Lake City attorney-physician Clark Newhall, whose stemwinder call to action prompted a crowd of 75 to shout out their disapproval.

"Health care is a right," Newhall cried. "We have a moral obligation to take care of our fellow citizens. Everybody in! Nobody out!"

The rally started with a clip from the 1976 film, "Network," in which actor Peter Finch as news anchor Howard Beale exhorts the nation to go to a window and shout, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

The traveling Mad as Hell Doctors -- Katharine Ottaway from Port Townsend, Wash.; Paul Hochfeld, of Corvallis, Ore; Joe Eusterman, of Wilsonville, Ore.; and Tim Jordan, of Phoenix -- are just as angry as Beale, and with other physicians have filed a formal request to meet with Obama sometime after they arrive in Washington on Oct. 1.

They want to talk about one thing: single-payer health care. The president has yet to respond, the group said.

Starting in Portland, Ore., on Monday, the doctors have traveled in a rented recreational vehicle throughout the northwest to Salt Lake City. They will travel on to at least 15 more cities before mustering with anyone who wants to join them in Gettysburg, Pa.

Then it's on to Washington, where they hope to tell the president why all the fuss over the public option and reform and allowing insurance companies to retain control over health-care delivery misses the point entirely.

"Our health care system is broken," said Hochfeld, "because it costs too much."

Taking insurance companies out of the equation and allowing doctors to redirect bills to a single public fund would cut $800 billion now going to administrative overhead and profiting off people's sickness from the $2.4 trillion spent this year on health care, Newhall said.

The audience, mostly like-minded on the need for single-payer health care, took turns before a documentary camera offering their own mad-as-hell commentary.

"I can't believe a country like this is turned against itself," said James Cooksey, a member of the Boilermakers union who attended the town-hall meeting. "I'm 57 and I've never seen anything like it."

But Richard Passoth, a Salt Lake City family therapist, told the doctors they needed to talk to their own about how their profiteering has poisoned the system. "Doctors have been a major part of this problem for decades," he said.

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