Posted on 05/01/2010 8:28:44 AM PDT by neverdem
At a recent social gathering, a doctor friend who has been in private practice for almost 15 years revealed something that caused one physician to nearly choke on her drink, another to gasp in disbelief and the rest of us to stop what we were doing and gawk as if he had committed some grave social faux pas.
“I love what I do,” he announced to all of us. “I really love being a doctor.”
His wife, suddenly aware of the silence that fell upon the room, inched closer to her husband. “He really does,” she said nodding to confirm what some of the rest of us couldn’t quite believe.
While I had often heard older, usually retired, physicians speak about their love of doctoring, hearing a doctor currently in practice talk about the job with such fondness was so rare that it left us stunned. More frequently, doctors’ conversations about work reflect a sense of disenchantment, frustration and even anger — not toward patient care or...
--snip--
“Physicians have concerns about the power and undue influence of third parties and insurance companies,” said Dr. Daniel Palestrant, founder and chief executive of Sermo. “When it comes to medical practice, they are saying this just doesn’t work. They are acting in effect like the canaries in a coal mine.”
These canaries may be right. Last year, a study published in the health policy journal Health Affairs found that physicians in private practice on average spent nearly three weeks in time and $68,000 in staffing per year dealing with the particular administrative constraints of third-party payers. Doctors who were specialists could better afford to support these costs; but primary care physicians devoted as much as a third of their average yearly income (including benefits) to these interactions with the various health plans...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Various health benefits became tax deductible during World War II's wage and price controls.
NY Times anti-private insurance propaganda, stright from the orders of Obama.
85% of Americans are happy with their health insurance.
60% want Obama/Democrat care repealed.
Surface chemistry helps direct stem cell fate
Chocolate Lovers 'Are More Depressive', Say Expert
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
thx.
If these idiots think that regulation and red-tape will decrease under a government program they should immediately schedule themselves for a brain MRI to find out what's wrong with them. Anyone who has spent any time at all at a VA hospital as a physician knows what a nightmare it is to order tests etc., and how many ridiculous government forms have to be filled out. The system can be made better, but government involvement is most definitely not the way to do this. Cocktail party liberal MDs are very hard for me to take sometimes.
The article touches upon something that fails to get much mention: That there is no discrimination in procedure or pricing for those physicians with a good record of efficient and effective care. My bet is that any insurance company that tried to institute such a system would run into a firestorm of protest from their physician customers, among other things because developing the necessary metrics is a very difficult task. Yet it is there that the real opportunities to develop more efficient life services lies. It is a problem certainly more suited to competing approaches than single payer, but we will never get there in a climate so accustomed to "fairness" with a dark side of dumping those providers who spend the effort to fix a problem early rather than dispose of an expensive patient.
Third-party payers includes the government, not just private health insurance. Regardless, the docs are none too happy, especially the primary care docs.
Health plan requirements cost practices billions, with the per-doctor average near $70,000
Survey: 60% Of Primary Care Physicians Would Choose Another Field That number is well over two years old.
What? And the government is not a "third party"?
Mistrust concerning third parties began with the adoption of Medicare in the mid-sixties. What the NYT tries to do is suggest that the solution to this dilemma is to return to the care of those who started it in the first place.
One of my doctors recently told me that Medicare was cutting his reimbursement by 21% starting this month. He expected his clinic would soon be deciding to no longer accept Medicare patients. I hope all those seniors who voted for hope and change realize that Obamacare cut more than half a trillion dollars from Medicare and will use part of that to give care to illegal aliens.
bump
And 0bamacare will ensure that almost everyone must succumb to third party bureaucracy of the worst kind - government bureaucracy. Of course, the NY slimes doesn’t mention that Medicare and Medicaid deny care at higher rates than private insurance and that there is essentially no independent external appeals process for the government insurance (ya think the government will over-rule itself much).
Whenever I have a denial of care of a government insured patient, I tell them that there is essentially no functional appeals process. I give them the phones numbers with instructions to call and complain to their Dim Senator and Dim Rep in the exam room before giving them their prescription. I tell them that the Dims have cut $500B from Medicare & Medicaid to finance 0bamacare for the multitudes including illegals.
Great. The appeals process now consists of begging your Dim pol. The elderly very definitely and even the poor actually do get this.
There will be discrimination in the future: the Texas Medical Association is convinced that incentives for efficiency will become pay for performance. The Legislative Council also reported that all those “guidelines” that are being written, now, by our professional associations will become legal, even civil responsibilities. They warned that deviation from the guidelines will become “per se negligence.”
Legal group-think. This presupposes that such determinations should be made by courts in the first place. What I was describing is alien to that description.
It is deviation that leads to improvement. Without room to "fail" we lose experimentation. At that point, experimentation is confined to institutions capable of socializing the risk, such as government universities. At that point, politics enters the mix as to what types of research are approved for grants in the first place. It is there that parties interested in advancing particular outcomes become invested. I see little good coming from that, in part, because the socialized risk management architecture elevates the risk by virtue of its institutional lethargy and risk aversion.
What part of the group-think in Washington convinces you that they can understand even the basic concept of deviation or room to fail?
The only experimentation the staff (who wrote this bill in the first place) care about is social reorganization.
The guidelines and “per se negligence” fit perfectly with the mind set of the tort and lobbyist lawyers and a crowd who can’t read the bill in the first place. They have no concept of what it means to be a professional with pride in doing the right thing, much less someone who will actually do their homework and know what they’re talking about.
None. Which is why government doesn't belong within twenty miles of the risk-management business. Frankly, I think you are way too charitable toward the legal profession to boot.
The only experimentation the staff (who wrote this bill in the first place) care about is social reorganization.
Actually, I don't think they're experimenting at all; they're selling to the highest bidder who keeps them in business.
If they could be bought, we’d have a chance. Instead, these are elitist socialist ideologues, set on ending our 230+ year Constitutional government, based on the Declaration of Independence and Judeo-Christian values. Instead, the rest of us will be delegated to the lowest common denominator, while they become the oligarchy in charge of an overwhelming, unelected bureaucracy.
One of the most telling aspects is the attempt to exempt themselves from the regs they were writing.
The wearers of the T shirts that say “You can’t cure stupid, but you can vote them out,” have no clue the extent that the bureaucracy is now in charge. (Of course, none of us do: they haven’t written the regulations, yet.)
Um... no. The people with the money ARE the real socialists. The reason is simple: buying a government is cheaper and more predictable than is staying on top in the real world of a free market. Most of these creeps inherited their money and know that they don't have and aren't interested in developing what the skills and intensity their forebears possessed.
The pure ideologues are merely useful idiots.
Excellent point. The bureaucracy is out of control.
I thought it was more than an attempt. Didn't they succeed in that attempt?
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