Posted on 06/27/2009 10:12:21 AM PDT by gusopol3
President Obama's ambitious plan for radically increasing the government's role in the nation's health care system misses one critical detail: There aren't enough primary care physicians in America now and their numbers are declining. That means government won't be able to deliver the expanded health care Obama is promising to millions of uninsured people. With access to primary care already deteriorating in many parts of the country, Obamacare will make it even harder to get a doctor's appointment without a lengthy wait. "The politicians don't talk about who's going to do this extra work," Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and author of the 1993 book "Your Doctor Is Not In," told The Examiner. "Promised coverage is not the same thing as care. All you're getting is a place in the waiting lines."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
The idiots in congress tend to overlook the loss of workforce when people decide to retire rather than work for peanuts...and they also miscalculate how many people will NOT be paying income taxes when they are out of work. The IRS is already showing a huge drop in revenues this year... The projected numbers and the real numbers are radically different.
President Clinton gave NYC 400 million a year not to teach doctors - does anyone know if this is still being paid?
Pakistani and Indian doctors will increase. However, the ones I know came from the caste system.
there are already too many physician assistants in circulation.
the three that i’ve seen are unsatisfactory.
Especially when the Doctors realize their incomes have been capped.
It already is!
Why bother to come here when the financial incentive is being attenuated?
Thank God that congress wrote an ammendment to Obamacare exempting themselves from any of this. This way at least we wen't be waiting behind Barry, Shelly , Nanci and Barney since they'll have their own elite system.
The only kind of post-partum ‘abortion’ I agree with is aborting 0bamacare.
I think they’re very good at physical exam and documentation, but to have the level of expertise os a physician,they’d have to be ....physicians!
“the three that I’ve seen are unsatisfactory”
Those “unsatisfactory” ones are usually on the lists of the “cheapest” insurances. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to tell patients they may want to get a second opinion before being operated on by a few of “those unsatisfactory” kinds of docs.
This has no more to do with providing health care than the Cap & Trade has to do with climate change!
It’s all smoke and mirrors!
We have met the enemy.
All it takes to destroy a nation is a pack of clueless politicians.
My sister loved her crooked-Democtate Congressman because: “He does wonderful things for our district.”
the free market, if only the bamster would let it work, is beginning to show results. the ama is especially fearful of the "minute clinic" industry that's popping up. just wait til walmart jumps into healthcare with both feet
obama and his socialist minions MUST be stopped
I think that many of the specialists will just move offshore and open clinics in places like the Caribbean where those left with enough wealth can still pay whatever is necessary to get proper care. Most of us, however, will be out of luck.
And, the nurses. They make pretty good money now. Obama will surely tell them they make too much. Then patients will be looked after by people who were previously techs and porters. After all, they were in the room sometimes when the nurses did their thing. They should be able to pick it up quickly.
The next illogical step is simply to redefine what is a physician, and what can be done by “allied health professionals”. Sounds crazy, but hey- the entire world is upside down.
If the current trend continues, much of health care will be delivered by non-physicians. And much of dentistry by non-dentists.
It’s really the only way to do it on the cheap.
this will collapse faster than cap and trade, in my opinion; a lot of the contraction of services is going to occur very early on, and the demand will increase very quickly also. It sees that with cap and trade, they’ve been able to delay a lot of the cost to the public.
obamacare can't be undone
RN’s are already starting to feel the pain. Most hospitals, in order to meet costs, are hiring less of them and more LPN’s and nursing assistants. Pretty soon, each unit of a hospital will have exactly one RN- in order to access the Pyxis (drug machine), and hand out the meds.
All of that other stuff can be handled by ancillary staff. Well, that’s not what I think, but that is what is going to happen.
sounds right
Yep. Many hospitals will fail and be taken over by the federal government to serve as regional clinics. All will be staffed by immigrant doctors each being paid $100K - $125K per year. Of course, they'll be totally unaccountable to their patients, so there will be no need for them to pay for malpractice insurance.
The doctors will be earning less than many nurses currently make, so you can imagine what this will do to the qualified nursing staff. I guess that's where the Indians and Pakis that flunk out of medical school will end up.
In short, you will have to pay more for healthcare if you want better service.
The relative pay cut for primary care is pretty astonishing. If you’re in a major metro area, you may only pull $120k or so per year in general pediatrics. That’s decent money, but it’s not for investing a good 11-years of your life in training and are $100-250K in debt from that schooling.
It also pales in comparison to the 350K or so an anesthesiologist or radiologist can pull.
There’s going to be a shortage of primary care physicians in the future. No way around it with the way that MediCare keeps cutting reimbursement levels.
My point was that this is nothing more than a money/power grab.
They’ll keep the power and redistribute the money to make the world a much more “fair and level” playing field. (riiight)
That’s what all social/fascist believe !!!
When Canadian doctors balked at socialized medicine, Trudeau made it easier for foreign doctors and nurses to become licensed in Canada.
One of my closest friends is a trauma care physician in Ft. Worth. He has plans in place to switch careers if this nightmare becomes a reality. And, he tells me that many of his colleagues do as well.
* The scientific dishonesty of Global Warming
* The lines of the US Postal Service or DMV
* The compassion and humanitarianism of an IRS agent
* The fiscal responsibility of the Pentagon and its lobbyists who brought us $500 hammers and $1,000 toilet seats
* The lobbying of the wives of likes of Senators Daschle and Dodd
* Expansion of staff for Senators and Congressman to handle health care disputes
...and this....
The New Stasi (formerly known as ACORN) guards a geriatric clinic. Elderly shooed away told to 'Do us all a favor and go home and die, you are nearly shovel-ready'.
we already have so many FMGs ; besides we have a very specialty -skewed medical delivery system. Since the cost savings are supposed to come out of the specialties,I can’t see the work force as being that elastic.
Anybody with an ounce of independence is going to contemplate this. Wait until the regulators move into private offices the way they dominate nursing homes, hospitals and other public pay entities.
I’m an RN and I’ve not seen too many PA’s and Np’s that I would trust my patient’s to. I try to shift around them to talk to the doc’s when ever I can help it.
I once went to the WalMart vision center for a checkup. The optometrist was a Rumanian trained opthamologist. She escaped Rumania shortly before the revolution and went to Canada where she worked as an opthamologist.
She decided to come to America but her credentials were not accepted. The best she could do was optometrist. She was biding her time at Walmart while waiting to take over a private practice.
Common problem in developed countries with socialized medicine.
What is the answer? Importing third world doctors.
The writer of this article sure doesn’t get Obamacare.
The whole idea is to have far less physicians. Fewer physicians, less care provided, reduced costs in health care.
There, Obama solved it.
People will die, but everyone has health care...
I got this in an e-mail a while back, it was funny at the time.
Now . . . . sounds pretty damn cheap!!!
********************************************************
Dear Mr. President,
Please find below my suggestion for fixing America’s economy.
Instead of giving billions
Of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses,
Use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic
Retirement Plan:
There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.
Pay them
$2 million apiece severance for early retirement with
The following
Stipulations:
1) They MUST retire. Forty million job
Openings
–
Unemployment Fixed.
2) They MUST buy a new American CAR.
Forty million cars ordered -
Auto Industry fixed.
3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off
Their mortgage -
Housing Crisis fixed.
It can’t get any easier than that!
P.S.
If more money is needed, have all
Members of the Congress and their assistants pay their taxes...
The pilot program in NY was in 1999 or 2000..all teaching hospitals reduced the residencies in ALL specialties by 25% to see if the teaching hospitals could stand the loss of 1/4 of the residents. They did. The next year, the Fed Govt cut the funding (about $125,000 per training slot) in ALL training institutions in ALL 50 states. The production of all specialists was reduced by 25% and the reduced numbers trained has remained the same since then. The American trained specialty doctor shortage is deliberate.
I would suggest to all freeprs that if you don’t currently have a primary care doctor that you start looking for one now before this possibly happens. Usually once you are in a doctor’s care then when he retires and turns his practise over to another doctor that you should be transfered too unless you move to another doctor on your own.
More than capped. Capped and reduced. Doctors tax capability and profit come from private insurance exclusively, not Medicare. There are little or no profits in Medcicare even if the whole day, late afternoon and evening are Medicare. As much as 75% of a doctors time in practice can result in only 15% of income. As little as 25% of practice time can prodcue 85% of income, and all of it comes from private insurance.
If a ‘public option’ competes with private insurance, the doctors income will drop drastically with the increase of national health insurance reimbursement rates...look for a reduction of 50% or more in some specialties. At least one specialty was cut more than 50% by the draconian Medicare cut of 1991 (the great break year)and, its’ rates have been frozen at that level for 18 years...and “L” shaped event with no uptick to date, and only imminent further reduction anticipated.
This should have been "Many will not survive coming doctor shortage"
Yep. The law of unintended consequences - otherwise known as what happens when idiocy rules.
Sure it will. They’ll just let nurses do a lot of the doctoring. Just about everything but surgery. Just like the rest of the third world countries.
Add to all the reasons listed above this post; 0bama driving doctors and nurses of conscience out of medicine by forcing them to do abortions.
He's right; many of us do. The ones who don't have such plans will quickly develop and implement them.
The thing that still scares us, however, is that we'll still be potential patients... we can't escape that any more that you can.
I am in a rural area that is blessed by a number of physicians. Of course, they are all in one building, one town and that facility is owned by the mega-regional hospital in the closest city. However, some years ago, we were fortunate to get a Turkish Christian pediatric neurologist in one of the former private practices. He was actually working as a family practice doc, not a specialist. Besides being a great person, he was extremely well-educated, a terrific asset, the acknowledged diagnostician in t he area and everyone who could attend any of his inservices benefited greatly.
Sadly, for us all, his mother and his wife refused to live *out in the sticks* and demanded he return to New Jersey. He is still missed.
There are decent trauma nurses. A friend of mine is almost thru her advanced practice degree. She has been a head triage RN here for decades, ran the ER, served in Desert Storm at Landstuhl and in Afghanistan in charge of a 300-bed field hospital. She taught our local surgeons, one of whom is a famous orthopedist with an elbow operation named after him, valuable things about trauma medicine and surgery. She had to teach some of her Army docs who came into her field hospital from a general practice. She also outranked them.
She will likely join one of local practices when she has finished the advanced practice work. I have always prayed that she would be on duty in the ER if I or anyone I cared about was injured. Years ago, I saw the on-call doc just hand her a signed pad of scripts to use during that shift. He trusted her judgment and competence implicitly.
I have physicians and nurse practitioners in my family. We don’t get along, as they are all liberals, but the NP is every bit as competent as the double board certified specialist.
I haven’t yet met a PA that I am comfortable with, but I have enough lay knowledge that our local PA will turf me to one of the docs if I insist. It helps to have lived in one place for over 35 years and to know the med staff on a personal level.
I hate this bill and hope it never comes to pass, but there are competent practitioners out there at all levels. There are also docs, such as a former surgeon who was fired because his morbidity rate was excessive, to whom I wouldn’t trust my animals. In fact, our vet was a corpsman and he has a zero morbidity rate. I have assisted for him and his OR is the cleanest place I have ever seen. He cleans it himself, floor to ceiling.
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