Your doctor-patient relationship changes

“What people don’t realize is that under Obamacare, your doctor-patient relationship will drastically change,” were his words to me.  That caught me off guard and so I investigated. A few days ago the MGMA did a survey of its docs. 29% plan to participate in Obamacare.  15% will not.  56% are still up in the air.  Now if we just take 15% of our docs off the market to most people, think what that means for ability to find a doctor when needed.  And why were so many uncertain if they would participate at all?  That caught me off guard so I investigated.

“While everyone yaks about the healthcare website and higher premiums, let me tell you about the real impact this will have on physicians and patients,” he went on.  

What is happening with Obamacare is that payments to individual doctors will be much less than to the large hospital corporations. Hence doctors are relinquishing individual practices and joining hospitals to be paid on a piece basis for patients seen and procedures performed.  The docs get paid more and the hospital covers their malpractice insurance.  Why wouldn’t a doc join a large healthcare provider instead of slaving away on  individual practice?  Right now it takes 5 support personnel for every individual practice doctor and roughly 3 are involved in paperwork.  That may double or triple as new bureaucratic agencies take control of healthcare practice.  The bureaucrats will tell your doc what to do and what not to do if he wants to get paid.

Why does Obamacare want to squeeze out individual doctors?  Socialism.  It’s easier to deal with a few large corporations to control the industry, as the national socialists used to note.  So you push everyone into a group/union.  Unionism, groupism (in Mussolini’s Italian it was fasci, “group or union”). 

It gets worse.  Obamacare pays hospitals and corporate providers better if they simply contract an ACT (I think that is the correct acronym).  This is a program where they take limited responsibility for keeping you somewhat healthy.  The corporation is paid by the head.  Maybe $2000 a person is the blanket coverage.  You can only go to their facility unless you apply for a hardship (should you turn up at a hospital in Nicaragua)  The corporate doctor you often see is rewarded, not for healing, but for low-cost maintenance. “Here, we will subscribe a pill for that old broken knee of yours.” (Knee surgery costs big money. Pills are cheap.)  Hence your doc will be like an arm of insurance doing minimal to fix your health.  He won’t be allowed to look at you like a doctor, but like an insurer/bureaucrat.

Now are you seeing why so many docs are saying they simply won’t take Obamacare or may not?  Here’s one doctor’s way of putting it (anonymous quote from Heritage Foundation).

 

“These new boards and commissions under Obamacare will tell doctors: “These are the procedures you will do, and these are the ones you will not do.” Treatment will be restricted, reimbursement will be further decreased, more doctors will retire early, as I have already seen with many colleagues.

People need to think carefully when they say “Obamacare will offer health care to those who have none.” It promises to offer health insurance, but what sort of health care results when Obamacare adds even more government busywork and approvals to an already highly regulated system?”

 

Welcome to the brave new world.