Posted on 07/01/2012 6:31:52 PM PDT by Dysart
The Doctor Patient Medical Association Foundation conducted a faxed survey of random doctors in May 2012. In the survey, it is clearly delineated that the medical system as it is changing is discouraging doctors from practicing. 83% of the doctors said that current changes made them think about quitting, and 90% of them thought the path of the medical field currently was wrong.
They apparently feel that their Hippocratic oaths are being compromised; 61% of them feel that Hippocratic ethics are getting more difficult to practice, which is troubling, since one of the cardinal parts of the oath is the phrase “I will keep them from harm and injustice.”
85% of the doctors surveyed felt that the patient-physician relationship is declining. 37% of the doctors said they were just squeaking by, and 39% said things would get worse over the next five years.
The doctors were virtually unanimous that the government is at fault for medicine being on the wrong track, and feel that corporate medicine is trying to destroy private practice.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
There is really only one problem in American politics - but it’s a lulu.The problem is that the wire services (there’s mostly just the AP, but the same problem would be almost as bad if there were 5 wire services of equal market share) inherently homogenize journalism and produce hubris within it. The claim of journalistic objectivity is IMHO a claim that multiple wire services would make, even in the presence of competition; wire services need that particular fiction. The claim of journalistic objectivity is pure hubris, and hubris blinds its carrier to his own weakness and folly. And journalism propagates that hubris to all who are not sensitive to its existence in journalism.
There is really only one problem in American politics - but it’s a lulu.The problem is that the wire services (there’s mostly just the AP, but the same problem would be almost as bad if there were 5 wire services of equal market share) inherently homogenize journalism and produce hubris within it. The claim of journalistic objectivity is IMHO a claim that multiple wire services would make, even in the presence of competition; wire services need that particular fiction. The claim of journalistic objectivity is pure hubris, and hubris blinds its carrier to his own weakness and folly. And journalism propagates that hubris to all who are not sensitive to its existence in journalism. It does so by creating a vast mutual-admiration society of all who accept the conceit that producers of goods and services are at fault for making the decisions which are necessary but which subject them to the possibility of the second guess.
“Objective” journalists and its acolytes whom journalism awards the admiration-society positive labels such as “progressive” and “moderate” (not to mention “liberal,” which in its literal sense is a positive label) arrogate to themselves the credit for the provision of the goods and services which the second-guessable decisions of management and entrepreneurship actually produce.
Good luck with that. Many foreign born / US trained doctors are taking their expertise to other countries. My sister has been a nurse for over 35 years, and she said their entire hospital may close.
What a load of BS......
True , but for a doctor to get sovereign immunity he must be directly employed by the government, as are military medics.
In doing so he is out of business as a small business, private practitioner, and employer of staff, exactly where the government wants him. Government bureaucrats will decide who and how many he sees, who he treats, how many hours he works each day, and who he works with, that's the price of immunity.
You're right, only the worst "doctors" will remain.
It would probably have to be foreign flagged and the clinic closed in port, but would certainly be legal.
Currently, I believe India has five star hotels and first rate hospitals combined in the same building specifically for medical tourism. Bring the family!
Back to DU with you. Idiot.
Doubt what I say at your own peril. I’ve never even read one article/ never even googled Du
Doubt what I say at your own peril.
Why?
“Dr. 0bama-Mengele”
Correctemundo..
Enough to allow for “pensions” of 9 feet of hemp..
Fraud and Abuse in Federal Programs
by Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven
August 2009
Introduction
Medicare and Medicaid
Housing Subsidies
Student Aid
Farm Subsidies
Other Programs
Conclusions
. . .
Medicare and Medicaid
Fraud in the two main federal health programs is huge, imposing costs on taxpayers at least in the tens of billions of dollars each year. As broad-based government programs, the massive size of Medicare and Medicaid makes them very difficult to police. Medicare, for example, processes 1.2 billion claims each year by computer, generally without human eyes checking them for accuracy.
Let’s look first at the fraud and abuse problems in Medicare. The Government Accountability Office estimates that there are about $17 billion of improper Medicare payments each year, including fraudulent and erroneous overpayments to health care providers. 4 That figure does not include the huge new prescription drug benefit, which is thought to be highly susceptible to abuse.
Other estimates of improper Medicare payments are higher. Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University, a top specialist in health care fraud, argues that estimates by federal auditors do not measure all types of fraud. He believes that as much as 20 percent of federal health program budgets are consumed by fraud and abuse, which would be about $85 billion a year for Medicare.5
Sparrow says that criminals can rip off federal health care programs simply by carefully filling out and submitting the proper forms, and then the “claims will be paid in full and on time, without a hiccup, by a computer, and with no human involvement at all.”6 He argues that the abuses do not just stem from occasional overbillings by doctors, but involves organized looting of health care programs by criminals.
A perfect example of what Sparrow is talking about was reported by the Washington Post in 2008. A high-school dropout with a laptop computer was able to single-handedly cheat Medicare out of $105 million by electronically submitting 140,000 fraudulent claims over four years for equipment and services.7
There are many ways that Medicare gets ripped off: “Billing by health care providers for services not rendered, billing for products not delivered, misrepresenting services, unbundling services, billing for medically unnecessary services, duplicate billing, increasing units of service which are subject to a payment rate, falsifying cost reports resulting in increased payment to the health care provider, kickbacks, and on and on.”8 You can read about the different types of fraud on Medicare’s website.9
One area of rampant fraud is Medicare’s medical equipment subsidies.10 One scam is for doctors to steer patients into buying motorized wheelchairs that they don’t really need, but that Medicare pays for. Then the doctors receive kickbacks from wheelchair supply companies or other operatives. A 2008 report by Senate investigators found that 30 percent of medical equipment reimbursements that they examined appeared to be fraudulent.11
Another area of fraud is Medicare’s home health care benefits. Medicare pays for home visits by health professionals under certain limited conditions, but patients find ways to illegally get around those limits. In addition, criminal gangs have simply looted this program by submitting false claims.12 The costs of Medicare home health care coverage soared 44 percent over the last five years, and fraud appears to be an important cause of the increase.13 Auditors have been concerned about fraud in home health care for years, but the problem never seems to get solved.
The bigger Medicare gets, the more fraud there is. The newest subsidy—the $60 billion a year prescription drug benefit—is thought to be particularly susceptible to abuse.14 A physicians’ publication noted that the benefit was “staggeringly complicated and largely incomprehensible to the very population it was intended to help. It’s also ripe with opportunities for the dishonest and fraught with traps for the unwary. … The drug program’s very complexity is a source of fraud.”15
The Medicaid program also has a giant fraud and abuse problem. The GAO puts the cost of improper Medicaid payments at $33 billion, or about 10.5 percent of the program’s total spending.16 But if improper payments are 20 percent of the program’s cost, as Malcolm Sparrow thinks might be the case, that would be a $63 billion annual loss to taxpayers.17
New York’s Medicaid is especially fraud-ridden. The former chief investigator of the state’s Medicaid fraud office believes that about 10 percent of the state’s Medicaid budget is consumed by pure fraud, while another 20 to 30 percent is consumed by dubious spending that might not cross the line of being outright criminal.18
A 2005 investigation by the New York Times found remarkably brazen examples of fraud and abuse in New York’s Medicaid. The article noted that the program has “become so huge, so complex, and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited … the program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste, and profiteering.”19 Here are some of the findings:
•A dentist stole more than $1 million from New York’s Medicaid by making claims for fictitious patients and procedures. She even had the chutzpah to make claims for 991 procedures supposedly performed in a single day.
•Medicaid’s subsidies for handicapped transportation are widely abused. The program pays $50 per trip for handicapped persons to go to doctor’s appointments, but investigators found that many people using the service were not handicapped and that many transportation companies were rigging the system to earn unjustified profits.
•Schools across the state charged Medicaid more than $1 billion for unneeded or unprovided special education activities as a way to bilk the state out of additional Medicaid grant money.
•Criminal gangs diverted Medicaid-covered muscle-building drugs that were intended for AIDS patients to bodybuilders.
Similar schemes to bilk federal health programs are routinely uncovered across the nation. Federal investigators say that they play “whack-a-mole” with organized criminals, because when they crack down on them in one area of the country, they move to a different area and continue bilking federal health programs.20
A classic type of fraud in both Medicare and Medicaid is double-billing. In one recent case, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey double-billed Medicaid repeatedly over the years by directly submitting claims for outpatient physician services, even as doctors working in the hospital’s outpatient centers were submitting their own claims for exactly the same procedures.21
Another area of fraud is Medicaid’s long-term care benefits, which cover the costs of nursing homes and home care for the elderly poor. Medicaid pays about half of the costs of all long-term care in the nation. The program has complex rules for eligibility related to one’s income and financial assets. But nursing homes are expensive, and so the program creates incentives for middle- and higher-income families to try and qualify for it. Indeed, an industry of financial consultants helps seniors hide their income and assets so that they become eligible. This sort of abuse costs taxpayers about one-fifth of the program’s cost, or about $13 billion in 2009.22
One reason why Medicaid has high levels of fraud is that it is an open-ended “matching” program. The states administer the program and decide how much to spend, but the federal government pays more than half of the costs. That creates a disincentive for state officials to worry too much about fraud and abuse. Indeed, state governments themselves have a history of abusing Medicaid by creating schemes to improperly boost their receipt of federal matching dollars. The Washington Post rightly called these state schemes a “swindle,” but noted the political resistance to doing anything about it.23 One solution to these problems is to turn Medicaid into a block grant and freeze the amount of aid to each state. That would immediately give states a big incentive to cut all types of waste, fraud, and abuse.
In sum, the magnitude and complexity of federal health programs results in a huge and ongoing waste of taxpayer funds. Sparrow argues that health care fraud and abuse “might be as low as one hundred billion. More likely two or three. Possibly four or five” hundred billion.24 The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Service told Congress in 2009: “Although it is not possible to measure precisely the extent of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, everywhere it looks the Office of Inspector General continues to find fraud against these programs.”25
See my previous post. Medicare fraud is a well-documented fact of public record.
The N.Y. Times, and the Washington Post..!! Yeah, they are objective source's.
You basically said...all M.D.'s are to blame in the post I replied to.
It's apparent you have an agenda. Fair enough...and it's noted.
No, I said “MDs”, not “all MDs”. A lot of them. Enough of them to trigger radical changes in the practice of medicine.
It happened in the eearly ‘80s when a lot of people weren’t looking. There was so much froud waste and abuse, it couldn’t be put off any longer. But the measures taken were surface, even while being radical. Much more was needed and that’s why we’re in the position we are in now.
MDs are good, some of the best humanity has to offer. That’s obvious. They are in a system which thrives on illness and now on FWA.
If they would clean up shop we’d be in good shape. They won’t, partly due to their well-deserved rep of being very lousy administrators.
They’ve allowed OB to take over.
They have been deafeninlgly silent during all of this, and I recall their being very vociferous during the Hilllary take over. She shut them out of the proceedings, which gave them a notable “you are known by your enemies” presitge and it was gratifying.
They’ve, at least the AMA have, made the Faustian bargain that abortion is OK.
Everyone who makes that deal ends up destroyed.
That’s the only agenda apparent here.
They lose.
If they went back to healing people for a living it would work.
Too far gone, I imagine. Unless there are enough left who do something. There are some, and they’re the only ones we do business with. Military docs are among them - the best. They heal and cure for a living- and it’s not much of a living compared with their former classmates but they’ll be in and enviable position in no more than a couple of years if we’re silly enough to let this unreversible thing pass.
No problem....
Grind away....
The govt just took over our health care.
No problem.
The government has failed us. It’s time to reset and go back to where we started. The US Constitution was designed for just such a contingency. Use it, or lose it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.