Posted on 01/05/2011 12:45:11 PM PST by St. Louis Conservative
While making the case for his health reform package, President Obama argued that his proposal would make life easier for small-business owners.
Unfortunately, Obamacare threatens to undermine a group of small-business owners that is perhaps more important than any other to his reform effort — doctors in private practice.
The number of privately owned medical practices has declined sharply in the past five years. In 2005, at least two-thirds of practices were in private hands. That figure has dropped to less than half today — and is expected to sink below 40 percent by next year.
Many doctors, specifically those who have just completed a resident specialty, are now choosing not to enter private practice in the first place. Instead, they’re heading to salaried positions at large hospitals. Last year, 49 percent of first-year specialists chose hospital employment.
Obamacare will only exacerbate these trends. Some of the law’s dictates will make it more expensive to operate small practices — even though the rules are supposed to reduce medical costs.
Take the new law’s health IT initiative, which pushes doctors to set up extensive electronic health records in hopes of better coordinating care among providers. More information, the law’s boosters argue, means less waste and lower costs.
But many private practices can’t afford to drop five or six figures on expensive health IT systems that may not even save them money.
(Excerpt) Read more at medcitynews.com ...
In the case of health care. Obama can control big insurance and big hospitals through regulations, and because he can easily demonize them for Alinskyite political gain. He can not do that with small private practices. Thus, he aims to destroy them and force those docs to move into massive HMOs and become salaried employees......salaries set by Medicare bureaucrats, mind you.
Why has the GOP not already repealed this monstrosity that will kill Americans in the millions if not tens of millions?
We have power, repeal it NOW and every day for the next 2 years.
Can imagine living in the skin of such jealous, hateful, and destructive people —> Obama and the entire Democratic party
Obamacare bump for later........
This thread brings to mind the movies “You’ve Got Mail” and “Barber Shop” that depict the struggle between mom and pop enterprise and large enterprises.
The small doctor practices are like the small book shop. They simply can’t summon up the business energy and initiative to compete and exist in the business as it presently exists. It is fashionable to lament the loss but the medicals are just having to meet the present the same as the book shop owner and countless other small but noncompetative and unskilled businessmen have.
Medicine must be delivered on a large scale to exist. the scope of managerial and business competence is simply not possible in a one man shop.
Barbershop has a nice ending but is polyannaish. The entrepreneurial effort will eventually be overcome by larger shops with lower costs and equal or better service. Sad but a truism.
Economies and increased abilities of scale make America what it is. The educational, governmental and medical institutions/professions are the hold outs and fight every step of the way to stay in the comfortable bur worn out old shoes. Change will come and the sooner it is embraced the less will be the eventual pain.
The list, ping
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The Obama administration is fascist. So of course they want to destroy small business and extort and intimidate big business. Some of the big businesses are willing collaborators.
my physician has already given up his private practice and become a hospital employee. He said he had to because of the costs of the electronic filing equipment ($250k). he’s also upset at the provision that if he does not treat to protocol, he could actually be fined.
Command economies (such as our current version of 0bamo-fascism) always seek industry consolidation because it allows the central power structure to seize more power. Then, a positive feedback loop emerges that promotes corruption through insider political dealings (corporatism). After that, productivity decreases because incentives are reduced for the actual providers of care (and further productivity reductions through unions).
Hopefully, as the system inevitably rots, perhaps a renewed private system based on real value can emerge.
In addition to the de-funding and repeal efforts, hopefully we will see some competing health care reform legislation now that promote competition through private enterprise.
“Big business is easy to control via the government....”
Precisely why we have to eliminate BIG government. The BIG government the Left has built.
Interesting. I would imagine that the cost of malpractice insurance alone would have long ago driven a lot of medical practitioners to do what your doctor did.
Doctors are quitting and no plans to hire more. His O-nothingness expects us to believe that when he adds 30 million people who are currently uninsured, WHICH WILL REQUIRE MORE DOCTORS BY THE WAY, it will save us money!!!!! That guy should stay on vacation in Hawaii permanently. Do they have better weed there by any chance?
The problem is that reimbursement for actual patient care is relatively low, while technical fees are 3-5x of the professional fees. Most of the technical fees are paid to hospitals. Secondly, Medicare A which covers hospitals pays significantly more for the same procedure than Medicare B which covers outpatient care. In our area, hospitals receive 4x more for CT scans than outpatient scanners. Medicare A reimburses at cost plus while Medicare B reimburses a set fee regardless of actual cost. The hospitals wanted to further limit outpatient facilities owned by physicians in the Obamacare bill and prevent physicians from owning hospitals. Currently, all of the capital in the system is with the hospitals while physicians are on a cash flow basis that continues to shrink. If current law and trends continue, it will be very difficult for physicians to maintain a private practice.
Primary care physicians are already in short supply. The Center for Workforce Studies predicts that by 2020 there will be a shortage of 45,000 family doctors and 46,000 surgeons. Unfortunately, Obamacare provides no funding to significantly increase their numbers.Emergency rooms will have to pick up the slack. The new law could result in as many as 41 million additional trips to the emergency room each year.
It will be difficult for ERs to pick up the slack since they don't have enough staff now to handle 41 million more cases per year and will have less staff as 0dunderHead Care rolls on.
0baMao's thoughts, speech and actions scream out "GLUE SNIFFER" to me.
IOWs he would not have been allowed to actually make medical decisions for his patients. Under 0bamaCare he would be little more than a technician working from a manual. No doubt that makes him mad.
Private Practice? - people out there on their own, actually running a project independently of government control and direction? Outrageous. Obamacare has nothing to do with better patient care - it is all about government types getting their hooks into probably the last field which so far has gotten along well without intervention from those all-knowing, resentful prigs.....
That's good, because the patients are going to be the ones suffering if all the private practice physicians are forced to work at hospitals. Doctors' quality of life will probably improve.
You will get sick at an odd time, and there will be some switchboard to call staffed by a PA.
Then, you will get triaged to some appointment a week later.
None of this squeezing you in the same day to a tight schedule in a private practice doctor's office.
Have fun with it, commie.
I am not pleased and have no dog in the fight. My hope would be that my own health care is not at risk.
The practice to which you longingly cling will not pay the overhead in today’s medicine. A case in point is testing. All medicine is now based on determining and interpreting numbers derived from a bewildering array of sources and tests. A small practice can not develop those numbers in a competitive manner. There is simply not the volume to keep costs of equipment and salaries down.
The solution is not hospitals but groups. Doctors who belong to group practices in effect draw on resources not possible on the smaller scale. The ability of the individual physician is leveraged and substantially increased by the group.
The coming necessity of electronic records that provide those myriads of diagnostic numbers to th wide spectrum of individuals that become involved in treatment further necessitate the ability of the group to gather, consolidate and then disseminate the information.
The group and associated economies of scale are the private solution and antithesis to the government owned and controlled medicine debacle.
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