Posted on 01/07/2012 5:34:10 AM PST by Kaslin
Are you having difficulty finding a doctor who will see you? If you are, brace yourself. Things are about to get a whole lot worse.
Right now, the biggest problems are in Massachusetts. If you live in Boston and are trying to see a new family doctor, get prepared to wait more than two months before you ever get a foot in the door. For the state as a whole, the average wait to see a new family doctor is one month. More than half of all family doctors and more than half of all internists are not accepting new patients at all.
What if you live in another state? Just wait two more years. In Massachusetts people are lined up waiting to see doctors because of the health reform championed by the former governor (RomneyCare). And as Barack Obama has said on more than one occasion, RomneyCare is the model for ObamaCare.
Why? In both the Massachusetts health plan and the new health care law the mistake is the same: insuring the uninsured, but doing nothing to enable the medical community to deliver more care. Massachusetts succeeded in cutting the number of uninsured in half — a worthy accomplishment. But the state did nothing to expand the number of doctors, nurses or paramedical personnel. The result: a major increase in the demand for care, but no change in supply.
I learned what this means in human terms a while back from a Boston cab driver. She was on MassHealth (Medicaid) and her biggest problem, she told me, was getting care. "I went down a list of 20 doctors before I found one who would see me," she said. "Twenty doctors?" I responded incredulously. "Were you going through the Yellow Pages?" "No," she said, "I was going down the list MassHealth gave me."
In Massachusetts, this is what the advocates of health reform call "universal coverage."
Bad as all this is, it is actually rather mild compared to what is about to happen in other states. In Massachusetts, less than 10 percent of the population was uninsured before the reform set in. In Texas, by contrast, one in every four people is currently uninsured. Insure half of those and the demand for Texas doctors is going to soar.
Estimates are that ObamaCare will succeed in insuring 32 million otherwise uninsured people. If economic studies are correct, once these folks are insured, they will try to double their consumption of health care. On top of that, ObamaCare does something that Massachusetts did not do. It will force the vast majority of people who already have insurance to switch to more generous coverage. For example, everyone will have to be covered for a long list of preventive care and diagnostic screenings, with no copay and no deductible. Once people have this extra coverage, they will be inclined to take advantage of it.
Get prepared, then, for a huge increase in the demand for care. The result will be growing waiting lines — at the doctors’ offices, at hospital emergency rooms, at the health clinics, etc.
In the early stages of Massachusetts' health reform, Governor Romney told me what he expected to happen. Instead of uninsured patients going to hospital emergency rooms to get expensive care in inappropriate settings (all paid for by the rest of us), he said, insured patients will be getting less expensive care in the offices of primary care doctors.
Ah, but the best laid plans …. Turns out that more people are currently seeking care in hospital emergency rooms and at publicly funded community health centers than there were before the reform! As one academic study concluded, in Massachusetts you have the same people seeking the same care at the same places you had before. Health reform has mainly meant shuffling money around from one bureaucracy to another.
When health care is rationed by waiting, who gets care and who doesn’t? Here is the real surprise. Just as ObamaCare intends to do, Massachusetts set up health insurance exchanges where the uninsured could obtain insurance, in most cases with generous government subsidies. Yet the newly insured are the patients having the greatest difficulty obtaining access to care. According to one report:
• Only 56 percent of family doctors accept patients enrolled in Commonwealth Care (subsidized insurance sold in the "exchange").
• Only 44 percent accept patients in Commonwealth Choice (unsubsidized insurance sold in the "exchange").
• The fraction of internists who accept Commonwealth Care and Commonwealth Choice is 43 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
In Massachusetts this is called "access to care."
Great article.thanks for posting.
bookmark
I see a lot of these Ugent Care clinics popping up. People must be going to them. Makes a lot of sense to me: faster and less expensive than an emergency room. The vast majority of people go to doctors for routine maladies anyway.
In Texas, it is difficult to find doctors who accept medicare patients.
An Urgent Care clinic opened in our town. The other morning while filling up I saw there was a line of several people out the door waiting to get checked in.
Is this in Massachusetts or Greece?
I don’t know if Greece has a healthcare problem, it does have a financial problem though
All you have to do to find out how well collectivist medicine works is by looking at the UK’s and Canada’s.
Steve Crowder checks out the Canadian health care system.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw
Romneycare, the precursor to Obamacare.
Coming to a town near you.
When I needed a new GP I phoned for an appointment and the conversation went something like: “The doctor isn’t seeing any new patients; wait, what’s your insurance?” I said, “Blue Cross Blue Shield.” She took the numbers and responded with, “The doctor can see you Tuesday at 9:00am.”
My local hospital, a huge building, has almost no hospital beds. Much of the interior has been rented to private doctors. This means that the hospital can legitimately send non-paying patients away because they don’t have the beds for them. As near as I can figure the actual hospital handles very few patients and, I’m guessing, not many long term care patients.
Laws forcing hospitals to handle illegal aliens for free, even long term care patients, have eroded the system to the point it can’t sustain itself. There are also numerous laws forbidding the very thing that would resolve much of the doctor issues; over-regulating nurse practitioners, for example. Keeping companies and organizations from establishing new clinics that would compete with hospitals, for another.
On the other hand, two types of medicine have dramatically reduced costs and improved results every year since their inception; Lasik and cosmetic surgery. That’s because these procedures are not paid for by “insurance.” Practitioners must compete in the open market. Hence, almost everybody can afford their services.
This is all thanks to 0bamaCare and Nancy Pelosi shoving it down our throats
The chameleon-teflon RINO Willard to Felon (now convicted) DiMasi:
"I bet you $10,000 that the evil we've done through today
will make ME the presumed ‘front runner’
with my controlled NBC and FOX News while YOU
rot in prison for eight years for what we do, partner."
Fast forward enough years and it will be like in every other state with socialized medicine - you’ll need to pay under the table bribes to get seen. Won’t happen right away but it will happen.
My insurance has a $20 copay to go to an urgent care vs. a $150 copay to go to the ER.
At the ER, be prepared for a long wait, an extended stay in the curtained room if you have insurance and many illegals and uninsured people in front of you. (I have been in the curtained room for 5+ hours with no one even checking on me- I seriously felt they were running up my bill on purpose.)
Urgent care, no wait.
It is fitting that this would be happening worse in uber-liberal Mass.
What about their WONDERFUL govt healthcare system?
I thought that was supposed to make healthcare available to everyone.
That has happened here akso. Turns out it was people lining up for painkiller scrips.
D.A. finally made him stop
The Current FReepathon Pays For The Current Quarters Expenses?
When I see articles like this I wish the Romney apologists hadn’t been run off so I could send them a ping.
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