How does one “go to the hospital” to see a doctor? Walk in the emergency room? Do hospitals actually have family physicians and GP’s? I thought hospitals only had specialists? How does this work?
In other words, we are going back 2,000-3,000 years in our health care. Either you cannot afford it, or you will be turned down. If you are over 50 your chances of getting major surgeries will go down. It costs more to keep you alive. Younger people, who normally do not need all these things done as older people do as our bodies break down, will pay for it only to not get to use it when then get older. ANYONE stupid enough to think the government is going to take care of you when you get old is simply stupid. The government does not want to take care of a bunch of 65-80’s people. They want us gone. Off the books. Not using up medical services. Not getting social security. Not using medicare. Simply gone and OFF the books.
Most of the new doctors coming in to the Veteran’s Medical Center here in Maine are mid-age doctors who closed their private practices to work for the VA.
My family also have 2 specialists who closed shop and are now on the payroll of hospital groups.
Most doctors are now government employees. Or might as well be, given all the laws and regulations that our “limited” government has put in place for them.
If the govt at 30% of the economy won’t be allowed to grow to 100%, they’ll accomplish the equivalent with regulations.
The Democrat's plan is working.
I was thinking we need to go back to pay the doctor when you go to the doctor like when I was a kid. There were no co-insurance payments. You went to the doctor you paid the doctor. Insurance was for catastrophic events.
We basically already have “government” healthcare. It’s where most of the money is coming from after being taken at gunpoint from the taxpayers.
The Government-Industrial Complex Ike warned us of is soooo 1960. Today it’s all about the Gummint-Healthscare Complex. I am never going to the doctor again.
My nephew (sister’s kid) is a neurologist who left his practice of 10 years to become an employee. Very sad.
The Internal Medicine doctor I had gone to for about 9 years did that in December. He dropped his private practice to go to work for a hospital about 40 miles away. He didn’t even bother to notify his patients that he was leaving.
Luckily, the local clinic had just employed another IM doctor, so the new doctor and another local IM doctor took in the abandoned patients.
We may see many more of these small local clinics closing as the healthcare costs and regulations increase.
If you like your doctor ...
And when the whole system is so mucked up no on in their right mind would become a docter?
And when 0bamacare causes the hospitals to shut down, or turn into hellholes that no one wants to work, the doctors that abandoned their private patients will be SOL.
Obamao’s plan is working, comrades! Eventually all doctors will work for the state run hospital system. The really good ones will be at the private hospitals reserved for the regime.
“Health economists are nearly unanimous that the United States should move away from fee-for-service payments to doctors, the traditional system where private physicians are paid for each procedure and test ....”
FWIW, Canada’s “one-payer” system uses mostly fee-for-service payments to doctors in private practice.
The date should read 02/15/2014—this is not a column from a year ago. The link has the date as 2014.