Tag Archives: Socialism

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Doctor shortage: how Obamacare makes it harder to find a doctor

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Remember how Obama promised that if you liked your doctor, then you could keep your doctor? It turns out that there is more to making policies than just saying what you’d like to do in a scripted campaign speech. The truth is that some health care policies will make you lose your doctor, regardless of what the President reads off of a teleprompter. Is Obamacare one of these policies? Let’s see.

Avik Roy writes about it in Forbes magazine.

Excerpt:

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported that, due to Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage, among other factors, UnitedHealth expects its network of physicians “to be 85 percent to 90 percent of its current size by the end of 2014.” The result? Some retirees enrolled in Medicare Advantage will need to find new doctors. And it’s a trend that could accelerate in future years.

[…]Over the next ten years, Obamacare was designed to spend around $1.9 trillion on expanding health coverage to the uninsured. The law pays for this new spending with $1.2 trillion in new taxes, and $716 billion in cuts to Medicare, relative to prior law.

[…]The private insurers who supply Medicare Advantage plans, like UnitedHealth and Humana, have been responding to the cuts by squeezing out inefficiencies in the way they deliver care. One obvious way to do that is to pay doctors and hospitals less—or kick out the providers who refuse to accept lower reimbursement rates. And that’s what United has done, according to the WSJ report from Melinda Beck.

“Doctors in at least 10 states have received termination letters, some citing ‘significant changes and pressures in the health-care environment,’” writes Beck.

Another one of my favorite health care policy experts is the ex-Canadian Sally C. Pipes, who knows all about the horrors of single-payer health care. It killed her mother! Here’s what she had to say about the doctors shortage in a Forbes magazine article from earlier this year.

The first problem is that we have an aging doctor population and since we do such a poor job of educating our children (public school indoctrination centers) we aren’t making any new ones:

Right now, the United States is short some 20,000 doctors, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The shortage could quintuple over the next decade, thanks to the aging of the American population — and the aging and consequent retirement of many physicians. Nearly half of the 800,000-plus doctors in the United States are over the age of 50.

The second problem is that adding more regulations and burdensome paperwork makes a lot of people not want to be doctors any more:

Obamacare is further thinning the doctor corps. A Physicians Foundation survey of 13,000 doctors found that 60 percent of doctors would retire today if they could, up from 45 percent before the law passed.

The third problem is that the government isn’t reimbursing doctors as much as private insurance companies do, and it makes them refuse to take government-funded patients:

They’ve long limited the number of Medicaid patients they’ll treat, thanks to the program’s low reimbursement rates. According to a study published in Health Affairs, only 69 percent of doctors accepted new Medicaid patients in 2011. In Florida, just 59 percent do so. And a survey by the Texas Medical Association of doctors in the Lone Star State found that 68 percent either limit or refuse to take new Medicaid patients.

Medicaid pays about 60 percent as much as private insurance. For many doctors, the costs of treating someone on Medicaid are higher than what the government will pay them.

These underpayments have grown worse over time, as cash-strapped states have tried to rein in spending on Medicaid. Ohio hasn’t increased payments to doctors in three years; Kentucky hasn’t raised them in two decades. Colorado, Nebraska, South Carolina, Arizona, Oregon, and Arizona all cut payments in 2011.

By throwing nine million more people into the program without fixing this fatal flaw, Obamacare will make it even harder for Medicaid patients to find doctors.

It’s not just Medicaid that’s the problem, either. It’s the government-controlled exchanges.

Healthcare providers are signaling that they may turn away patients who purchase insurance through the exchanges, too.

In California, for example, folks covered by Blue Shield’s exchange plan will have access to about a third of its physician network. The UCLA Medical Center and its doctors are available to customers of just one plan for sale through the state exchange, Covered California. And the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is not taking anyone with exchange insurance.

Now I know what you’re thinking – why not just force doctors to work for lower wages, like a good socialist country might? Well, that actually makes the shortage worse, because people don’t like to learn hard things and then work hard for little pay. And doctors work VERY hard – it’s not an easy profession to get into. That will just make all the doctors leave the country for other countries where they can be paid fairly for the work they do.

And in fact that is exactly what happened in a 100% socialized health care system in Venezuela, according to this report from the left-leaning Associated Press.

Excerpt:

Half the public health system’s doctors quit under Chavez, and half of those moved abroad, Natera said.

Now, support staff is leaving, too, victim of a wage crunch as wages across the economy fail to keep up with inflation.

At the Caracas blood bank, Lopez said 62 nurses have quit so far this year along with half the lab staff. It now can take donations only on weekday mornings.

I recommend reading that entire article for a glimpse of where the Democrats are trying to take us. There is not a dime’s worth of difference on policy between the Democrat party and the socialist party of Venezuela, except that the socialists have been in control in Venezuela for longer, and so they are further along the road to serfdom.

In other news, the Washington D.C. insurance commissioner was fired after raising concerns about the “fix” proposed by Obama in his speech last week. That’s also something that you might expect to see in a country like Venezuela. That’s what happens in authoritarian socialist countries. Whistleblowers and critics just disappear.

News

Health insurance companies will raise rates to comply with Obamacare delay

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CNS News explains how health insurance companies will respond to the last-minute attempt by Democrats to delay the implementation of Obamacare.

Excerpt:

After President Obama unilaterally changed his health care law on Thursday, the insurance industry issued a warning.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).

Here’s Ignagni’s full statement:

Making sure consumers have secure, affordable coverage is health plans’ top priority.  The only reason consumers are getting notices about their current coverage changing is because the ACA requires all policies to cover a broad range of benefits that go beyond what many people choose to purchase today.

Premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace.  If due to these changes fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase in the marketplace and there will be fewer choices for consumers.  Additional steps must be taken to stabilize the marketplace and mitigate the adverse impact on consumers.

A recent Weekly Standard podcast predicts that the Democrats are going to come down hard on insurance companies, and blame them for the failure of Obamacare.

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Obama vows to veto Republican “Keep Your Health Plan Act” bill

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Face a revolt among his own party, the President decided to delay the implementation of his own failed health care policy, until after the 2014 elections. He did this to help Democrat candidates in red states to not be thrown out for enacting a policy that will cancel the health care plans of millions of Americans. After the elections, Obamacare will take effect as planned and millions of Americans will lose their health care.

The Republicans have an alternate plan – let people keep their health care plans if they like them, just as Obama promised before he was re-elected.

Excerpt:

House Republican leaders announced Wednesday the lower chamber will vote next week on a bill that would allow people to keep their health insurance plan if they like it.

The vote hits at President Obama, who, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, said people could keep their healthcare plans if they like them. Millions of people, however, have gotten cancelation notices because of ObamaCare’s new standards.

Late Wednesday afternoon, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced via Twitter that the bill would get a vote.

The Keep Your Health Plan Act, H.R. 3350, was introduced last week by House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and more than two dozen Republicans. As of Wednesday, co-sponsorship had grown to 88 members.

Upton’s bill authorizes insurance companies to keep offering plans that they have said need to be canceled because of ObamaCare’s new insurance standards. Since early October, companies have sent out millions of notices to enrollees saying their plans will be scrapped and, in many cases, replaced by more expensive plans.

“Despite the president’s repeated promise of ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it,’ many Americans are now learning the sad reality that their current plan will no longer exist beginning on Jan. 1,” Upton said last week. “Instead they are forced to purchase healthcare that they cannot afford through a system that does not even work, and that’s just not fair.”

The Weekly Standard reports that the Obama administration has threatened to veto the Republican “Keep Your Health Plan Act”. Why? Because the true purpose of Obamacare requires that healthy people get kicked off their plans, and that they be forced to buy more expensive plans that subsidize the treatments of less healthy people.

The chief architect of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, explained in a recent interview:

“We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick, if you are going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance,” Gruber told host Chuck Todd. “The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners, who’ve been paying their artificially low price because of this discrimination, now will have to pay more in return. And that, by my estimate is about 4 million people. In return, we’ll have a fixed system where over 30 million people will now, for the first time, be able to access fairly priced and guaranteed health insurance.” Emphases added.

This is monstrous. Gruber admits that “If you like your healthcare, you can keep your healthcare” was a lie from the start. They never even intended to keep this promise, as doing so would destroy their scheme. The system Gruber describes is the intentional demolition of the private insurance industry, which bases prices on risk. He is also defining “discrimination” so far that given the chance, he would abolish capitalism and private property ownership itself.

That’s why Obama has to veto the bill – because he must accomplish his goal of making everyone’s life “equal” regardless of their individual choices. People who aren’t addicted to drugs must be forced to subsidize the drug addiction therapies of others. People who don’t have a promiscuous sex life must subsidize the promiscuous sex lives of others. People who don’t need abortion-inducing drugs must subsidize the abortion-inducing drugs of others. Wealth redistribution to equalize lifestyle outcomes. If you make good decisions in life, you must be punished. If you make bad decisions in life, you must be rewarded. If you earn money and save money because you have a plan of your own for marriage and family, then what you earn and save must be taken from you and given to others who earn nothing and save nothing and have no plans for marriage and family.

Not enough time to make the changes

James Pethokoukis explains that insurance companies don’t have enough time to restore the plans that Obamacare canceled. So the only real effect of Obama’s announcement is to give cover to Democrats who vote against the Keep Your Health Plan Act. That was the purpose of his press conference – to stop a revolt by people in his own party.