Tag Archives: Doctor

News

Duke U. researcher: 129 million people will lose health insurance under Obamacare

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From the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

If Obamacare is fully implemented, 68 percent of Americans with private health insurance will not be able to keep their plan, according to health care economist Christopher Conover.

Conover is a research scholar in the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an interview with The Daily Caller, he laid out what he estimates the consequences of Obamacare’s implementation will ultimately be.

“Bottom line: of the 189 million Americans with private health insurance coverage, I estimate that if Obamacare is fully implemented, at least 129 million (68 percent) will not be able to keep their previous health care plan either because they already have lost or will lose that coverage by the end of 2014,” he said in an email. ”But of these, ‘only’ the 18 to 50 million will literally lose coverage, i.e., have their plans entirely taken away. This includes 9.2-15.4 million in the non-group market and 9-35 million in the employer-based market. The rest will retain their old plans but have to pay higher rates for Obamacare-mandated bells and whistles.”

Conover also says it is hard to imagine President Obama didn’t know these statistics when he was flacking for his health care bill by promising Americans they could keep their health insurance if they liked it.

“If President Obama himself believed this the first time he said it, he was poorly advised,” Conover said.

“The problem is that he said it at least 24 times, most of which occurred after his own rule-writers had estimated that 49-80 percent of small employer plans would have lost their grandfather status by 2013, along with 34-64 percent of large employer plans. The same rule estimated that each year 40 to 67 percent of non-group plans not already grandfathered would lose their grandfather status. Given how extensively presidential statements — especially to a joint session of Congress — are vetted and fact-checked, it is pretty inconceivable that President Obama was not aware that he was engaged in some degree of truth-twisting.”

Surprise! It looks like what the Democrats wanted was to destroy private health insurance, after all. The nice thing about this is that finally the low-information voters who elected Obama are getting to see why it might be a good idea to get their political news from somewhere other than the Comedy Channel.

Commentary

Doctor shortage: how Obamacare makes Americans lose their doctors

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Mysterious Tim sent me this article from the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don’t have a clue how to best proceed.

Here previous private health insurance plan was doing a good job of honoring her policy:

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

I think that this is what Obama was talking about when he cautioned people about insurance companies that “screw you”. Yeah, private companies always screw people, Obama, never the government. What does this man know about how anything actually works in the real world, anyway?

More:

What happened to the president’s promise, “You can keep your health plan”? Or to the promise that “You can keep your doctor”? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.

For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people’s ability to control their medical-coverage choices and they may die. I guess that’s a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that’s the point.

Another factor that is going to make this situation worse is the widespread decline in the number of doctors caused by Obamacare.

Investors Business Daily reports on a recent poll of doctors by Deloitte.

Excerpt:

When our polling showed four years ago that doctors planned to leave the profession if the Democrats’ interpretation of health care reform became law, we were ridiculed mercilessly. But, as a new poll shows, we were right.

In 2009, our IBD/TIPP Poll asked 1,376 randomly chosen practicing physicians from across the country what they thought about the health care “reform” being considered at that time.

It found that 45% of doctors “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement” if Congress passed the plan the White House and the Democratic majority in Congress had in mind.

[…]But almost a year later, we were vindicated. An August 2010 Merritt Hawkins survey of 2,379 doctors conducted for the Physicians Foundation revealed that 40% of doctors said they would “retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care, or seek a job or business unrelated to health care” over the next three years as the overhaul was phased in.

Those three years are up, the country has found out what’s in ObamaCare, and the story remains the same.

The Deloitte 2013 Survey of U.S. Physicians found that six in 10 doctors say “it is likely that many physicians will retire earlier than planned in the next one to three years” — that is, in the age of ObamaCare — “while more than half believe that physicians will retire (62%) or scale back practice hours (55%) based on how the future of medicine is changing.”

The problem is that when government controls health care, they spend the money on things that will buy them more votes. People who need expensive care like this definitely do not get treated. In government-run health care, government takes control of the money being spent by individuals on actual health care in the private sector. They then redirect that money into public sector spending on “health-related” services. Instead of helping people who are really sick, government-run systems cut lose those sick people and concentrate on buying perfectly healthy people things like condoms, abortions, IVF and sex changes. They spread the money around to more people in order to buy more votes. The main goal is to get the majority of people dependent on government so that they continue to vote for bigger government. The few people who need expensive health care? They can just go die in a ditch.

The really sick thing is when a person works their entire lives, paying into a government-run health care system, and then when it is their turn at the end to finally get some treatment, they find out that they are denied treatment, and their money has all been spent on elective treatments for favored (liberal) minority groups. I’m sorry, but you can’t have treatment for prostate cancer, because we used the money we got from you to provide IVF to a professor of women’s studies who spent her fertile years advocating for abortion and against marriage. We should never be letting government control health care. Never.

News

New study: NHS patients are 45 percent more likely to die than US health care patients

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Wes sent me this article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Patients are 45% more likely to die in NHS hospitals than in US ones, according to figures revealing how badly England’s health service compares with those of other countries.

Previously unpublished data collated by Professor Sir Brian Jarman over more than 10 years found NHS mortality rates were among the worst of those in seven developed countries.

A patient in England was five times as likely to die of pneumonia and twice as likely to die of septicaemia compared to similar patients in the US, the leading country in the study, the data suggested.

The elderly were found to be particularly at risk in English hospitals compared with those in the other countries.

The figures showed that the situation had improved since 2004, when the death rate in English hospitals was 58% higher than that in the best performing country.

But NHS institutions still lagged behind in the most recent data, from 2012, despite reforms of the health service and increased funding.

Of the other six countries studied, only the US was named because of the sensitivity of the data.

Prof Sir Brian, who adjusted the data to take account of differences in the countries’ health services, did not initially release his figures because he was so shocked by them he at first assumed there must be a flaw in his methodology.

There was, however, “no means of denying the results,” he said.

“I expected us to do well and was very surprised when we didn’t,” the Imperial College London medic told Channel 4 News.

“If you go to the States, doctors can talk about problems, nurses can raise problems and listen to patient complaints.

“We have a system whereby for written hospital complaints only one in 375 is actually formally investigated. That is absolutely appalling.”

Previously, I had posted a summary of a book by Scott Atlas, a medical doctor at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. In that article, he laid out the reasons why the U.S. healthcare system was the best in the world.

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