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In oncology, doctors were allowed to profit from drug sales. So doctors would buy expensive cancer drugs at bulk prices from drugmakers and then sell them at much higher prices to their patients.

"I grew up in that system. I was spending $1.5 million a month on buying treatment drugs," he said. In 2005, Medicare revised the reimbursement guidelines for cancer drugs, which effectively made reimbursements for many expensive cancer drugs fall to less than the actual cost of the drugs.

Perhaps Obamcare is to blame, but in this particular example, the doctor did what many investors and speculators do in the financial markets every day: He played the futures market and lost.

There is another source of the problem....... change.

Just as we no longer have house calls, except for Hank-med of course, the ability of a single office of one or maybe three physicians to compete at a profitable level is going away or even gone.

Amalgamation into a group with many resources and abilities is the way. Even when Obama care is abolished, it will be replaced with some national system that includes medicare and the medicaid functions. The electronic assembly of all medical records is coming everywhere as well. An office that doesn’t participate or can’t participate will be at a severe disadvantage.

As an IT man, I have always noted how reluctant MDs are to embrace business technology. Although medicine is one of most high-tech fields we come in contact with, the technology rests in the medical equipment, and that’s where it stops. The average florist makes more use of databases, customer profile management, and every other aspect of modern computerized business than any MD out there. Go into a doctor’s office, and you will see a wall of paper jackets behind the receptionist. Those are the paper records that medicine still runs on, just as it was in the Fifties.

I can remember when Doctors offices has 2 or 3 people working for them...Some offices have 9 or 10 now...My old OB_GYN had only his wife, a nurse on the payroll...the overhead must be huge now plus thousands in insurance. Had one doctor told me (neuro-surgeon) that his insurance ran into several hundred thousand dollars per year.

I wonder how much of that is caused by lawyers and frivious law suits and so many different kinds of health insurance and paper work involved in keeping up with all the laws, rules and regulations that change each year...

Thanks for posting that.

Please consider the idea of maybe copying the following into your email-composing window and sending it to whomever you think needs it or might be willing to share it (and FReepmail me if you'd like to be on a low-volume emailers's ping list). Or not.

Subject line: Is Obamacare the runaway winner of the "America's Worst Idea" contest, or what???

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Now, let me get this straight . . . We're going to be "gifted" with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, a militarized civilian "ready reserve corps" and 33 new government committees to make decisions for us and our doctor, authorized by a 2,700 page bill written by a congressional committee whose chairman at the time says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes, which establishes permanent uncertainty about more than 1,000 questions, including "What constitutes a medical expense?" by authorizing the HHS Secretary to suddenly change the answers to them by arbitrary snap decision at any time, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes but will make sure we pay ours, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, which takes hundreds of billions away from Medicare and then imposes 25 new taxes, most of which kick in after the 2012 elections, yet scored by a non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that says it will add another TRILLION dollars to the national debt anyway, while it was supposed to "lower" health insurance costs but caused premiums to jump 9.5% in 2011 ALONE, and all of this is to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese and an administrator appointed by the president who has called for rationing (and who says "I love it" about the British Nationalized Health Service in which 25,000 cancer patients die every year while still on waiting lists), and financed by a government that is already broke and has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, is that right? Who could ever find anything wrong with that?
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Is Obamacare the runaway winner of the "America's Worst Idea" contest, or what???
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-- Yes, please DO pass it along ------>