America Is Rocketing toward the Health Care Precipice. Medicare-For-All Will Accelerate the Fall

American Thinker ^ | 02/06/2021 | Keith Jackson MD

[SeekAndFind]

Our American medical system with its deep pool of highly trained specialists, the best in the world when it accrued inside a culture of science and learning, is Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. It has had to focus its priority away from the doctor-patient relationship and more toward appeasing ever-expanding federal and bureaucratic control. Doctors and patients are pawns caught in a game of power. All the king's horses and all the king's men, so they say...but is there any way to save the best parts of our health care?

As the federal government hurtles toward a Medicaid-for-all system, justifying the expansion of access and affordability as its primary goals, it is alienating those who are supposed to provide that care. It is impossible to have access, affordability, and quality co-exist in any proposal. Access assumes there will be enough doctors to see all the patients and assumes efficiency in the doctor's offices. Nothing is as unaffordable as "free" anything when it comes to the federal government. Quality plummets when the best doctors quit.

Many doctors are losing their love of medicine. (Make no mistake: there are few professions as challenging and rewarding. Name another job where you are thanked for saving lives, even when that is often an exaggeration, on a daily basis.) But advances in care like the electronic medical record, while awesome in some respects, are a real time sink. In order to fulfil EMR billing requirements and still see enough patients to be able to cover their overhead, it is difficult to produce a factually accurate, non-fraudulent medical record.

Reimbursement is plummeting as unpaid busy work is accelerating. Doctors, as a result, are looking to retire early or try a new career. Older specialists, an irreplaceable reservoir of knowledge and skill, are the least pleased.

[SeekAndFind]

SOME STATISTICS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

* Physicians over 65 represent 21% of the total number of practitioners in the United States.

* When talking about doctors over 55 years old, this represents 42% of the total. T

* That’s 336,000 out of 800,000 physicians, and a lot of them do not like the way medicine is changing.

[sphinx]

Democrats don’t think this is a problem. We can always import doctors from India, and when that runs out, from Cuba.

[colorado tanker]

Thank Juan McCain. He saved Obummercare and blocked reform

[Shady]

Stay as healthy as you can. Period. You aren’t going to get any help.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

The cost of health care can be laid at the feet of the hospital-pharma-industrial complex. I wanted to pay cash for a medical procedure, and NO ONE would give me a straight answer. The question was always "Who is your insurance?" None, I want to pay cash. Evidently for every medical procedure there are dozens of different prices. There is no canonical price.

President Trump was well on the way to fixing this mess. Medicare for all would be a disaster. It would be out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[heavy metal]

we aren’t rocketing anywhere if biden keeps applying the brakes on musk...

[Sacajaweau]

Medicaid is a better deal than Medicare. Folks on SS are paying almost $150 out of their SS payment every month.

Medicare for all solves nothing.

[pierrem15]

Private insurance is going to collapse because the cost cannot be borne either by companies or employees.

I'm leaving my current employer because insurance costs for my wife and I are slated to be $1700/month. I looked at buying a comparable plan from BCBS where I live: $2580/month. I considered a high-deductible insurance plan with a HSA account. After adding up all the insurance payments made over the past year for both of us (minus any items still required to be "free" to a patient), I can see that I won't reach the deductible limit and our total cost of the insurance + medical payments would be the same as the $1700/month insurance plan.

So I'm taking a job with a Fortune 500 company where I'll earn more and pay only $273/month for insurance.

Some kind of half-assed national medical insurance plan is inevitable because the current system is simply unworkable.

[Pining_4_TX]

Yes, Trump was starting to deregulate many things in health care. We need more small clinics, nurse practitioners, and even pharmacists who can prescribe medications. Unpresident Biden will put the thumb screws on that and turn medical care over to a bloated bureaucracy.

[fruser1]

Don’t sweat it. We’ve got plenty of retiring baby boomers that will be denied service through rationing to make up the difference.