Centrist Tuesday Group In House 'Will Never' Meet With Freedom Caucus

The Hill ^ | 03/30/17 11:40 AM EDT | By Peter Sullivan -

[i_robot73]

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...The Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats...
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Just as bad? At least the DEMs stick together to pass their agenda (big govt/Socialism). REPs can’t even agree on what ‘small govt’ means, least of all following the Constitution.

It’s a consistent game of DEMs ahead 5 (reaching across the aisle), REPs back 1 (call ‘victory’), lather, rinse, repeat...

> Why can’t anybody actually attempt to govern?

I want NOBODY in D.C. to ‘govern’. I want ‘em to get the F* out of the way and out of my\our live(s).

Called Federalism. Learn it, live it, love it. THAT’S what they were *ELECTED* to do.

[Mr. K]

THAT was The Freedom Caucus’ first mistake- they should have held firm and threatened to give Nancy Pelosi the winning vote for speaker if they did not remove Paul Rino

[JimRed]

The time saved from the overwhelming regulation compliance will be available for patient care.

Yes, and eliminating paper pushers and compliance monitors would free up dollars for more medical staff.

[Ohioan]

For all the reasons that the free market is otherwise far superior to the planned economy, it is simply not logical to believe that a Federal bureaucracy can do anything but muck up the provision of health care--either in the short or long run. Indeed health care, the intensely local & immediate result of interaction between a particular provider (physician) and a particular consumer (patient) is far less susceptible to bureaucratic meddling than is almost any other subject for socialist meddling.

You can run an industrial plant by a bureaucratic check list a lot easier than you can treat the biologically unique problems of quite different individuals--with differences in susceptibility, symptoms, resistances, etc., etc.

It is only because of the neurotic compulsion to level everyone, that so many fall into the errors involved.

And as for letting Americans die. Consider how Jefferson described a welfare system that actually worked in 1782 to see how far we have fallen in our understanding of how actually to address social problems: Jefferson On Welfare.

Of course, with Health Care, the system which worked did not require the intervention of the Church vestrymen. The traditional Hippocratic Oath, of the then not over governed physicians, used to take care of that.

[Ohioan]

The death of the charity hospitals to which you refer may have been recorded under the Clinton/Bush & Obama administrations; but the process really got underway, after LBJ's vast increase in Federal meddling in the 1960s. There was a sea change after that in medical care, as physicians office staffs gradually morphed into accounts receivable processing, from a prior emphasis on assisting in the diagnosis & treatment.

Patients, who before the advent of Medicare & Medicaid, would have been covered by the Hippocratic Oath, suddenly morphed into a new source of revenue. The psychological effect was enormous.

[JayGalt]

Yes.

Hillary introduced big business to the idea that there was revenue to be exploited. Up to that time medicine was separate from business per se. It was an apprenticeship and charity care was part of being in that profession. The best of the doctors in the area participated in the teaching hospitals, donating their time for rounds and patient care of the indigent. The residents did the paperwork and routine care with attendings as back up.

There was a camaraderie that has been lost as the paperwork & regulations swamped the system and the idea of a week a month or two days a week rounding & operating on charity patients has been lost because of the press of busywork & pressure on fees from insurances. It was sad to see medicine transform from the calling that it was to many physicians, into a business model. It will be interesting to see where it will go from here. We can’t & wouldn’t want to turn back the clock but a shift back to the doctor patient relationship being primary, without the distortions of layers of regulation and with tort reform would be a good start.

[JayGalt]

More than that it would free up doctors & nurses time.

It used to be that the most important part of meeting a patient was to look & listen, concentrate on what they were saying but also what you observed.

Today most physicians have so much paperwork that they see patients with laptops or workstations in front of them and glance at the patient while thinking which column to check or how to rate each item on the screen. They are still looking at the screen finishing up the paperwork as they generate a list of tests and cost codes.

That is the real damage that has been done. The focus has been shifted from patient care to dealing with the bureaucratic workload. That has had a devastating effect on patient care and both patient & doctor satisfaction.

A large % of a doctor’s staff are personnel to fight through the swamp of insurance forms & pre-authorizations, personnel to make sure all the rules on HIPA, lab protocols, testing of equipment etc are maintained. More could be done with less staff if they weren’t required to deal with the above. That would bring costs down in a hurry. People do not realize that for the office to function it is as many as 6 compliance/insurance people for 1-2 doctors depending on specialty. It used to be 1-3 people.

[Ohioan]

Agreed!!