No-Fault and Workers Comp both set their own rates in NY and have for years
Posted on 05/31/2010 7:13:03 AM PDT by Reeses
Doctors could join trade unions as anyone else if they are employed by a large organization such as a hospital organization. Increasingly, doctors are giving up solo and group practice for this option.
In this case, the doctors were in small groups and the government contends that they colluded in refusing to accept Idaho’s low worker’s comp rates. This seems rather farcical. It’s hard enough to get independent doctors to agree on anything in the first place so such a collective action appears to be against their nature. However, there does come a point when the cost of delivering a service falls below the reimbursement and naturally almost all providers will stop providing service.
What I find really chilling is the censorship.
“It’s a naked censorship order that restrains the physicians from encouraging, facilitating, entering into, participating in, or attempting to engage in any actual or potential agreement or understanding with, between, or among competing physicians about” ... various contract terms etc.
Does this mean that a casual discussion of insurance company rates such as that insurance company sucks is now groups for a conspiracy? They are going to use the Patriot Act to wiretap physicians conversations?
The goal here, I believe, is to get physicians out of independent solo and groups practices and force them into large organizations where they can more easily be managed. But this hard ball tactic will surely drive even more specialists int early retirement.
Anyone exhibiting medical needs which are non life threatening are given a prescription for weed to smoke and some warm rocks to place over the karma irregular zone, traced out by a state health worker with a sharpee marker.
Anyone with life threatening symptoms such as sepsis, renal failure, liver failure, or coronary disease will be given morphine to ease the pain. The morphine will also have high levels of arsnic to speed things up a little.
Cancer will not be something the state health worker is able to diagnose and therefore follows the above two treatment protocols in the same order.
I wish you would stop knocking obummer care.
I have already received the benefits of obummer care.
My part B insurance premium has gone up.
I have received a letter from my GP advising me that the last day of August will be his last day as a practicing GP.
So that leaves me with a relatively short time to find a GP willing to take on an 82 year old with A. Fil. on Medicare
False analogy. Doctors are not employees of a corporation with which they might collectively bargain, unless of course they work as employees of an HMO or some other organization, in which case the union analogy might work.
Doctors are more often businessmen supplying a product to the general public. In the event the government gains complete control of the health care system, doctors will then be essentially civil servants.
The analogy at present actually much closer to all the lawn service guys in town getting together and setting minimum prices for mowing a lawn or gas station owners agreeing to a floor on gas prices.
Such actions have been illegal for a great many years.
I don't begin to know enough about the specifics of the case to decide whether the docs are legally or ethically justified in their actions. I do know governments and other payers for services tend to think they can "control prices" by fiat, in which they are of course incorrect. A price is what it is. You can subsidize or obscure how it gets paid, but if you succeed in "controlling" it the availability just disappears.
It's normal operating procedure now for doctors to collect only 50% of their accounts receivable. They must double their charges on paying customers to remain solvent.
I wonder if the actions of the bar associations ever cross this line.
As far as I know, the bar associations set various barriers to entry and other anti-competitive restrictions on the hiring of the services of attorneys.
I think it's worth an investigation, at least.
Such functions were assumed by mediocre youth with skills and tools issued by the state. The result is that a few billion died when the government could afford nothing less. That's a lot of carbon footprints erased, mouths to feed, clothes to issue, electricity and water to distribute, medical supplies saved, and most importantly.........a whole lot less people to keep a watch on.
I give it 5 years.
A. Fil....is that the same as A Fib?
FWIW, In the last two weeks, both my family doctor and my cardiologist have announced that they are quitting. No mention of the reason but someone I know in the cardiologist office told me it was due to “financial pressures” because of medicare cutbacks.
I used to belong to an association of companies providing certain types of residential services. Every time we met the officers were obliged to remind us it was illegal to discuss pricing.
Everybody did anyway, of course, before and after the meeting, but doing it openly and officially was verboten.
Nothing new about any of this. Adam Smith: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
No-Fault and Workers Comp both set their own rates in NY and have for years
The List, ping
Yes, that is alarming - to say the least...
The government can conspire to set what doctors get paid but doctors can’t conspire to refuse those set pay rates... It won’t be long before there’s a massive shortage of doctors.
Leftest think their goals trump individual rights. I can only hope they are in for a very rude awakening.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/reckoning+approaches/3088816/story.html
Things are gonna get tough for the over 65 crowd.
Doctors are soon going to start working for cash Only, they will not and can not afford to take whatever the Government decides to give them as a fee.
Agree. Something I have believed in for a long time.
The Supreme Law of this Nation is the Constitution. Anything else is against the law. Simple, but truth ;)
Yes. Sorry for the temporary brain short circuit.
If you look at all of the hidden stuff in the obummer medical bill, you can see that there will be a lot more than doctors working for cash only.
You will see a black market like this country has never seen, equal to any of the third world countries.
Just the 1099 requirement alone will force most to go “under the table, off the books”.
Simply because no family and/or no family business or small corporation has a book keeping system that will track vendors in the manner required.
So if you try to follow the law, you will automatically end up with an unfriendly audit.
I expect that the programmers are trying to update their systems to flag all vendor accounts that equal to or exceed $600 in transactions but then how many families and small businesses can afford to buy a new accounting system?
A friend of mine just told me today she was under twilight sleep for an operation, but could hear what the doctors were saying. This was a few weeks ago.
She said they were blasting Obama, they just hated him and thought he would destroy our medical system, that people had no idea the damage he was causing to medicine.
She said everyone in the operating room was virulent about how much they hated him.
My GP stated in his letter that it was due to the fact that the practice of medicine was no longer fun and that it was soon to get even more difficult.
So although he did not name the bill by name, it does not take much to figure it out.
Anyway, he had hinted at it for some time. When I would mention politics for instance, he would comment that he was looking forward to early retirement.
We are going to lose a lot of good doctors.
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