The Doctor Won’t See You Now - American health care is in a bureaucratic death grip. (Mark Steyn)

National Review Online ^ | Dec 14, 2012 | Mark Steyn

[neverdem]

A few years ago, my small local hospital asked a Senate staffer if she could assist them in obtaining federal money for a new building. So she did, expediting the process by which that particular corner of northern New Hampshire was deemed to be “under-served” and thus eligible for the fed gravy. At the ribbon-cutting, she was an honored guest, and they were abundant in their praise. Alas, in the fullness of time, the political pendulum swung, her senator departed the scene, and she was obliged to take a job out of state.

Last summer, she returned to the old neighborhood and thought she’d look for a doctor. The sweet old guy with the tweed jacket in the neatly painted cape on Main Street had taken down his shingle and retired. Most towns in the North Country now have fewer doctors than they did in the 19th century, and the smaller towns have none. The Yellow Pages lists more health insurers than physicians, which would not seem to be an obvious business model. So she wound up going to the health center she’d endowed so lavishly with your tax dollars just a few years earlier...

[neverdem]

Ping

[basil]

ping-—to read later.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Modern healthcare as Americans know (or knew) it is an immensely complex thing. This Obamacare monstrosity presumes to embrace the entire craft from stem to stern in its arms.

This is so not going to work, and the GOP will so have its “I told you so” moment. But not before millions of Americans have needlessly suffered.

[Buckeye McFrog]

A family member who is in nursing school says they are being taught how to give a complete physical. Very interesting!

[Buckeye McFrog]

This is so not going to work,

It's not meant to. It's meant to drive all private insurers out of business though before it collapses. Hello, Single Payer.

[SunTzuWu]

So good luck retaining any meaningful doctor-patient confidentiality in a system in which more people — insurers, employers, government commissars, TSA Obergropinführers, federal incentive-program auditors — will be able to access your medical records than in any other nation on earth.

Steyn sure has a way with words. "Obergropinführers", I've got to remember that one.

[Truth29]

Pretty soon, you will start to hear some version of “party card, comrade” for priority access to whatever health care is available. The leftist cadres will get taken care of first and conservatives will be at the end of the line. There will also be application of the remaining life value model and old, expensive, non privileged category patients will have their care limited and will therefore die at greater rates than those destined for greater rolls in the New America.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Single payer doesn’t help handicapped US practice. The US practice got as good as it did because of the US market. The rest of the medical world could coast on their own socialism because America enlightened it. Snuff out the light and the whole world will be in the dark.

Single payer or not, it is so not going to work.

[HiTech RedNeck]

It won’t be “party card,” because Congress already gets its own, as do the principals in the other branches of government.

[Tax-chick]

lacking the one consolation of statism — the great clarifying simplicity of universal mediocrity

*snicker*

[Gritty]

Just another in the never-ending stream of Liberal nightmares in post-Constitution Amerika...

[Houghton M.]

Congress Schmongress. The “party card, Comrade” will be for the bureaucrats. They are the new Rulers, the new Nobles, the new power-holders. Arm-in-arm with the union thugs they will play the role of the Party Cadres in our Brave Old World (Old because it’s just repeating the same sad stupidities of the Bolsheviks and Maoists and Castroites.)

[Marcella]

The article says, “My comrade Michelle Malkin noted the other day that her own general practitioner has now switched over to “concierge care,” under which all third parties (whether private insurers or government) are dumped and a patient contracts with his doctor solely through his checkbook.”

My doctor also went with “a concierge care” goup and it was going to cost me $1,650 a year just to go in the door to see him. I already pay $250 a month for a supplement to Medicare (and Medicare cost is taken out of my SS check and it goes up every year) and would have to pay this $1,650, too.

So, I had to get another doctor, even though I had this one for over 16 years - he dumped me and the rest of his patients in one day and none of us had a doctor as of that day unless we joined the concierge group.

Healthcare now is a quagmire at every age. You can't count on your doctor being there anymore.

[Zack Nguyen]

So, I had to get another doctor, even though I had this one for over 16 years - he dumped me and the rest of his patients in one day and none of us had a doctor as of that day unless we joined the concierge group.

I'm sorry to hear that. That is very tragic. What a lousy mess the new health care law is.

[RobbyS]

We will soon be like Britain: you get the NHS, or if you have enough money, your own private doctor.

[RetiredTexasVet]

What’s coming .... just look at the former great Britain. Nationalized health care. The elite are taken care of royally, the common people not so much. Hospitals recruiting Pakistanis and Indians to run the health care system. Needless deaths because of communication problems. So bad that the nurses are not even competent to answer the telephone.

[riri]

In Sweden you are issued a personnummer. You give it everywhere you go from the bank to the doctor to the video store. You can’t do a dang thing without that number.

[Salman]

In Sweden you are issued a personnummer. ...

Like a Social Security number?

[AZLiberty]

This Obamacare monstrosity presumes to embrace the entire craft from stem to stern in its arms.

Which means we all get it in the stern.