Posted on 12/23/2009 11:52:09 PM PST by eartotheground
Democrats are touting the American Medical Association's endorsement of President Obama's health plan. But there's an important reason why the American College of Surgeons and 18 other specialty groups are opposed.
The plan's most tangible efforts to restrain medical costs are through its controls on specialist physicians. Based on the government's premise that they often make wasteful treatment decisions, the health-care legislation in Congress will subject doctors to a mix of financial penalties and regulations to constrain their use of the most costly clinical options. The penalties and regulations are aimed first and foremost at surgeons and the medical devices that they use, largely because that's where the bulk of spending is.
It all starts with the sweeping power that the Senate bill gives to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency will be given the authority to unilaterally write new rules on when medical devices and drugs can be used, and how they should be priced. In particular, the Obama team wants to give the agency the power to decide when a cheaper medical option will suffice for a given problem and, in turn, when Medicare only has to pay for the least costly alternative.
Now the Obama team will use murky provisions embedded in the Senate bill to subtly attain in law those powers they couldn't more artfully acquire in court. In fact, the bill lets Medicare seek almost any restrictive payment authority it wants from a Medicare Commission established for the purposes of cost control....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Doctors to lose patients
Patients to lose lives.
Dem deathcare.
Now we know why they want Palin to sit down and SHUT UP.
That article details it as well as any I’ve read so far.
What a mess.
The simple truth is doctors, specialists in particular, will be abandoning the profession by the thousands.
Very sick people will be dying before they receive attention because of a growing shortage of physicians and bureacrats delaying or forbidding treatments and medicines.
We are heading for health care worse than in many third-world countries.
Excellent post that exposes how we do not get the best minds elected to office because they can't process this simple bit of statistical common sense.
Not one word about reducing Tort lawsuits which cause doctors to use every test possible to practice defensive medicine.
The bankruptcy courts will be flooded.
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