Your doctor won’t tell you this when you’re sitting in his office, so I will: He hates Obamacare. It’s time you know why your doctor is concerned about Obamacare. Posted on 04/30/2012 4:16:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
Your doctor won’t tell you this when you’re sitting in his office, so I will: He hates Obamacare. It’s time you know why your doctor is concerned about Obamacare.
Doctors already live in constant fear of malpractice lawsuits. The last thing they want to do is stick their necks out and publicly attack Obamacare. Doctors also do not have an effective D.C. lobby group or public advocate.
A 2011 survey by Jackson and Coker reports that most doctors believe the mega-lobbyist group, American Medical Association (AMA), fails to represent docters’ interests on Capitol Hill. Forbes reports: “Much of that dissatisfaction stems from the organization’s support for President Obama’s contentious health care reform package. … [The AMA] has backed a law that would force some physicians to work longer hours for less pay and others to operate in perpetually overcrowded emergency rooms.”
Doctors question how the AMA can represent them in D.C. while cutting back-door deals with the government. Doctors have been effectively forced to fund the AMA by purchasing Medicare and Medicaid billing code books. Dr. Jane Orient, a privately practicing doctor in Arizona, blew the whistle when she discovered that, beginning in 1998, the Health Care Financing Administration gave: “… the AMA the exclusive copyright on the codes…” reports The New American.
Since the AMA does not speak up for doctors, I will try to be a voice for doctors. Here are two primary reasons why your doctor hates Obamacare:
1.) Doctors Need Ownership
Dagny Taggart is the heroine of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” At one point, Dagny asks a renowned medical doctor named Dr. Hendricks why he left the medical practice. He says: “I quit when medicine was placed under State control … Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquiring that skill [performing brain surgery]? …I would not let them [politicians] dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. … Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”
Obamacare removes ownership from the medical field. An individual doctor no longer owns his education, career or even day-to-day lifestyle choices. Under Obamacare, he goes from feeling a sense of caring ownership for his patients and his craft to feeling over-worked, under-paid and micro-managed.
Obamacare effectively steals from doctors by confiscating the skills, energy and time they have devoted to medicine. When you steal a man’s life-long passion; his hard-won goal; his lifestyle—do not expect him to be happy or to maintain his conscientious passion for practicing medicine.
2.) Doctors Need Motivation and Compensation
A better name for Obamacare is the “16.7 Percent Paycut,” because that is what it means for doctors. In order to “save” Medicare, Obamacare asks doctors to take a 16.7 percent paycut. And, guess what? Patients will suffer, not just doctors. Patients will suffer because smart and caring young men and women will forfeit their dreams of entering the medical profession and choose alternate careers that promise less stress and higher pay.
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to visit my brother at his medical school and meet some of the other medical students. They were intelligent and hard-working individuals who clearly cared about helping people. I did not get the sense that money was their primary motivation in becoming doctors.
Indeed, 60 percent of doctors are concerned that Obamacare will diminish their ability to care for patients, finds a Feb. 29, 2012 survey completed by The Doctors Company Market Research, America’s largest surgeon and physician medical liability insurer.
Money simply allows smart young Americans, like my brother and his peers, to justify spending an additional four-to-ten years after college holed up in a library just to graduate with $160,000 in debt (the median debt load for medical school grads according to a 2010 Mayo Clinic study).
There are 70 million baby-boomers out there who will be looking for geriatricians soon. But there is only one geriatrician for every 2,600 Americans over the age of 75, according to the American Geriatrics Society. Why is this? Money. Geriatricians made a median salary of $183,523 in 2010, reports the Medical Group Management Association. America desperately needs more geriatricians, but young doctors are choosing to specialize in other areas because they can earn two-to-three times more.
Money is a suitable incentive, especially when you are asking people to give up their youth studying while amassing debt. But Obamacare removes the practical “profit motive” of capitalism and replaces it with the idealistic “poverty motive” of socialism.
A Better Way
I think trying to save something that is hopelessly broken, like Medicare, is a mistake. Ultimately, I think it’s a choice between complete government control over limited medical care resources or a more freedom-based system where prices are lower because competition exists and health insurance is actually insurance (now, insurance covers basic, common care which is ridiculous and causes overall healthcare costs to rise). Insurance should only be involved in major medical care; otherwise, it’s not insurance, it’s maintenance.
When it comes to medicine, you get what you pay for. As patients, I think we should be willing to pay a little more in exchange for the highest quality of care. Sorry, President Obama, but your plan is “JurassicParkCare”—doctors go extinct and their patients go untreated while your buddies in Hollywood cheer.
No secret about it. My doctor will tell you flat out that when it goes fully into effect he is retiring. He is not selling the practice, he is closing it.
And so ends a practice that has been open for over 60 years.
I just got out of the hospital and received excellent care. My doctor had to call in 2 different specialists to work with her to diagnose and cure my problem. It was a lung infection. Under Obamacare I know that treatment would not have happened. It wouldn’t have been cost effective.
People will receive very basic care under doctors and nurses who no longer see patients as human beings but as numbers to be dealt with as cheaply as possible. It will not even be our doctors deciding how much care we need but government panels. It’s sad but true.
My wife of more than 30 years is a general surgeon who has been in private practice since 1985. She typically works 12-14 hour days, with call every 5th weekend and rounds every third, plus “time-saving” electronic medical records (previously known as charts) to complete over each weekend. She is tired, and demoralized by Obamacare’s implications for her many Medicare patients who are very fearful they will lose her to Obamacare. And, guess what? They will lose her, and many, many physicians who are in their prime of experience.
We were outraged by Barack Obama talking two summers ago about greedy, overpaid doctors who amputate limbs and remove tonsils needlessly to make more money. Barack Obama and his minions know NOTHING about the sacrifice and hardships that are secondary to being a private practice physician in today’s regulated market.
I am angry - white hot angry - at what Obama has done to our country. Even more, I hold a raging, burning contempt for people who support Obama and his policies. I know it is anti-Christian, but I wish harm to those who would vote for him knowing what he has done to the USA.
“The best and the brightest (doctors) used to go into academic medicine.”....
And how do you know this sweeping “fact”? In my experience, and that of my general surgeon spouse, most of the top-tier academic physicians - at least in surgery and the “hand-on” specialties - spend more time on airplanes than in the OR. Too many of them can’t find their rear ends with both hands because they simply aren’t operating daily. Just an observation......
It’s no secret between many of my patients and me. I choose the ones I talk to about it a bit carefully, but many of them bring it up from their side. Even libs offer unsolicited worries about where medicine’s going, how long I’ll stay in practice, what will become of them when I take down my shingle.
Secretly??? Roflmao! I am friendsvwith all my doctors and everyone tells me their disgust every time I see them.
“....what will become of them when I take down my shingle.”
I believe my primary doctor was asking himself the same question about all of his patients, perhaps causing him to remain in practice for a few additional years.
My doctor has been retired for about 8 months. He was my doctor for the last 40 years. He delivered both of our children and for the past 10 years, my health issues caused him to see me every 6 to 8 weeks, sometimes more often.
We became friends over the years and I will always miss him. I was fortunate, in that his son became my new doc, but it’s just not the same.
I am certain that many older folks, perhaps with medical issues far more serious than mine, will be devastated to find themselves locked in a cold heartless and unfamiliar doctor-patiant environment.
I suspect that ‘trust’ will be one of the first casualties of state run medical care. For me, trust is a very big part of the doctor-patiant relationship, greatly effecting the desired outcome, thus the patients health.
Thank you for all that you do....
Cheers....
There you go again, Frank, painting the sky blue. ;>)
It’s going to get very ugly.
Nahhh...I ran out of blue paint a long time ago...
As of today, I’m officially on Medicare (well, actually it was the first of the month), so it’s gonna be weird next time I go to a doc and present that and my Plan F Supplemental cards.
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