Slate: If Doctors Boycott Obamacare, Squeeze Their Pay

The reality of the insatiable liberal desire for control and need to punish those who refuse to play the statist game is on full display in a recent Slate class-envy piece, “Doctors Fire Up the Obamacare Waaambulance,” by Matthew Yglesias.

Fully acknowledging the reality that doctors will be paid (far) less under Obamacare and, thus, will reject the system in droves, Yglesias tries to assuage his liberal readers’ fears by presenting the perfect punishment for the miserly, self-serving M.D. class: Use the Obamacare leviathan and regulations to “reduce doctors’ payment rates elsewhere in the system.” Here’s the key passage:

Medical doctors are highly paid professionals. They earn more money—a lot more money—than your average American. What's more, American doctors get paid more than doctors in any other country. Given how much of health care is financed either directly (Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, public-sector workers) or indirectly (tax subsidy for employer-provided insurance) by the federal government, it's natural to make restraining doctors' income part of any program for making health care more affordable. So when you read stories about doctors whining that Affordable Care Act exchange plans don't pay them enough, please throw up a little in your mouth and proceed to ignore the doctors' complaints. The only practical reason to worry about low compensation for doctors in the ACA exchanges is it may cause them to boycott exchange patients. If that happens, the solution is to reduce doctors' payment rates elsewhere in the system. If we ever reach the point where American doctors have been squeezed so badly that they start fleeing north of the border to get higher pay in Canada, then we've squeezed too hard. Until that happens, forget about it.

One positive about the destructive rollout of Obamacare: It's giving America a hard look at the rank underbelly of the radical left.

“Medical doctors are highly paid professionals. They earn more money—a lot more money—than your average American.”

To become a doctor you must get A’s & B’s in high school studying science in order to get into college where you also must get A’s and B’s in fairly rigorous course work in order to study 4 more years in med school where there are no C’s.
At this point you begin your residency for 2-4 years and if you want to specialize another 3-5 years of fellowship training. How many, “average Americans” work this long and hard to hang their shingle?

This clown reminds me of some freak I saw on DU many years ago, who defended a story about Cuban doctors moonlighting as cabbies. They just did that for “extra” money, according to the DU freak.

On a related note, I’d point out that there are quite a few docs, especially GP/Family doctors, who aren’t exactly raking in the bucks. After they pay the bills (malpractice insurance, staff, rent, etc.) there are some docs out there struggling just to break even.

Obamacare has suffocated business and individuals with all of it’s onorous regulations. Look at how the individual mandate is destroying individuals policies (how many millions have lost health care in the last ~60 days). Wait till the employer mandate goes into effect. Many small businesses are going out of business and larger businesses are leaving jobs unfilled. Obamacare is a job killer. Since the White House controls the Census and the Department of Labor, no one can trust the jobs numbers any more, and you will never know the true damage Obamacare is doing to the labor market.

With a supermajority now on some sort of government dole, the ruling elites will always vote for more government and more giveaways. The country is already dead, it just doesn't know it. It will slowly spin down economically as more and more productive people just give up.

Eventually, the whole system will collapse and the country will descend into a second Dark Age. It has happened before, it will happen again. It is inevitable.

Yeah, doctors are leaving practice because of low reimbursement rates, so the solution is to cut their pay further. Commies are as dumb as a post.

Places like the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Northern Mexico, & the Caribbean islands may very well wind up as medical Meccas. Doctors could move their practices to such places to provide quality care at an affordable, cash prices, free of onerous US bureaucracy, monopoly insurance companies, & US torts. This may not work for GPs but could work well for specialists.

As Obamacare destroys the greatest health care system in the world, that greatness will move to other areas of the world. For Americans of means, health care vacations to foreign destinations will become a reality, just as it currently is for Brits & Canadians now.

Next up, passport control to keep the doctors from moving their practices out of the country.

The mechanism for that is already in place because the IRS can freeze anyone’s passport application by putting a $50,000 tax lien against their name.

Don’t bother packing, Doc. You’re not going anywhere.

These folks actually believe that doctors will stay in the system while bneing punished by “restraining doctors’ income.” Restraining doctors’ income will, of course out here in the real world, sharply reduce the total quality of medicine radically. Skilled physicians will depart the specialty or the country and the lost numbers will be made up by lowering- lowering a lot- the knowledge and ability requirements for being a physician. Medicine will become a relatively low paid service job. The real Doctors that continue to practice will be in offshore clinics in Costa Rica and Dominica or, if the long arm of the USA starts flailing in the neighborhood, in Thailand and Vanuatu.Of course that will lead to border controls. We won’t be allowed to leave the country if we cannot produce a certificate of perfect health.

If we ever reach the point where American doctors have been squeezed so badly that they start fleeing north of the border to get higher pay in Canada, then we've squeezed too hard. Until that happens, forget about it.

Currently, medicine attracts many of the smartest and hardest working young people. They HAVE to be smart and hard-working to make it through the training. That's why many of the wealthy of foreign countries come to the US for treatment, instead of going to Cuba.

No, what will happen is that the smartest young people will forget about picking pre-med as a college major.

Yes, it did. Hillary’s scheme was on its surface more ambitious than kenyacare. She intended to use it to begin instituting mobility controls on Americans, pretty much locking us in our medical zones- No medical treatment allowed if we were to get sick outside of our Zones. Mobility restriction has always been a big desire of the Left. All those people just going where they want to go when they want to go there is disconcerting to the would Puppeteers.

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