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Doctors complaining about Medicare demanding documentation from them is not becoming.

doctors like to play the who me game.

Patients don’t pay for their own medical care, third party payer does.

And when patients don’t work, they get government health care.

When patients are illegal, they use emergency rooms, where the hospital or the government picks up the cost.

When I pay $6500.00 for a half day in the hospital for my kid, and foreigners roam the hall waiting for their family members to get out of surgery, I know I’m paying for them because I am stupid enough to have a job.

That $6500.00 pays for those who don’t pay.

But doctors get paid.

And this system is going under.

Medicare went bankrupt in the early eighties, and, in addition to it being a flawed system, it failed in great part due to the vast amount of theft from the medical community - doctors, pretending the reimbursement they received from the govt was free money.

It was doctors who sunk medicare. They should have seen it as a flawed system and not grown dependent on it.

Instead they bled it dry.

Now people who abuse their bodies their whole lives get excellent medical care and those who choose to eat right, go to the gym and visit competent natural healers pay out of pocket, while the self abusers get huge money.

If any doctor does not, or hadn’t, seen this as a system with a time limit, they can cry me a river.

It is not a system which heals, or prevents disease or includes patients in their own healing.

And PS, if the AMA would stop being pro abortion, it might get back in the graces.

As it is, the only doctors we go to are those who are pro life, who accept and include our choices of treatment, and who don’t treat us like we are stupid with no knowledge.

But they are few and far between.

doctors had better figure out that government and insurance pays them and if they don’t like it they can do something else.

There’s this comment:
“My doc sees me for two to three minutes per visit and charges medicare for an “extended visit”, every time.”

Then there’s this comment:

“I spend more time keeping insurance companies happy and trying to play medicare/medicaid games than I do taking care of patients. And it breaks my heart when I can’t get around the insurance company to do the right thing for the patient.”

Which is it?

Doctors work well with medicare and appreciate the relationship they’ve created with each other? Or doctors don’t need medicare, so they don’t rip it off nor complain about it?

“doctors had better figure out that government and insurance pays them and if they don’t like it they can do something else.”

You sound like you think doctors and hospitals can just divorce themselves from government. As a whole, they can’t. Hospitals cannot survive without Medicare and Medicaid. Period. So many people are now dependent on the government that although a few Concierge practices will no doubt be successful, I do not believe medicine in general can function that way until we get the government out of medicine. And it will not go willingly. Hospital licenses, doctors’ licenses, nurses’ licenses, ancillary services, procedures, billing, charges, scheduling, etc. are all regulated by big government. If anyone wants to provide health care, they must do so under the thumb of big government. Even people with no connection to medical care, employers in general, are now forced to provide health insurance, which is regulated by...you guessed it, big government.

As to the ‘extended visit’ charge. The problem is that that designation even exists. What business is it of the federal government to tell anyone what they can charge for their services. In my area a plumber will charge you $175 to walk in the door. Yet $180 is too much for a doctor visit?

No matter the length of time the Dr. is in the room with you, you have been screened and examined by a nurse (for whom the doctor pays salary and benefits), your chart, vitals and reason for visit has been reviewed by the doctor, and when you leave there will be more charting and planning and insurance billing to be done (for which the doctor pays salary and benefits to other staff).

The government says if you dot these i’s and cross these t’s you may charge for an ‘extended visit’ and we will pay you $X, so that is what the doctor must do to survive. Just because you don’t like the sound of ‘extended visit’ correlating with a short check-up doesn’t mean the visit wasn’t worth the charge.

The problem is that the government doesn’t actually want to pay what they say they will, and when everybody learns to cross the t’s the government comes up with more rules to justify cutting payments, or they reject or delay bills for no reason, forcing the doctor to go through the same hoops over and over just to get paid.

Trust me, if doctors could get the government out of the healthcare business, they would, but it is the mindset that ‘greedy doctors’ need to be controlled that has allowed this to get to where it is now, because what entity is more in love with control than big government?

And what you are seeing is that doctors do not like it, and many of them are going to choose to do ‘something else’. Heaven help us when we find out who will be left to practice medicine under these conditions.

“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.”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I’m running out of 2 centses

my point is, not all/and not the majority(in my opinion) of Doc's are committing FRAUD... vote RAT maybe but not criminals

my Doc is a Col. in the NYANG and has been deployed THREE times, and anybody telling him he's defrauding the system has a good chance of getting knocked on their arse for it

the Doc i had before him was a Doc in the Air Force for 20years till he retired and went into private practice and retired after 20years of that

and i doubt any of the FReeper Doc's here are criminals either

saying they are all criminals and telling them if they don't like the system to quit is the same as saying everybody in CA and NY deserve what ever happens to them even though there are good God fearing Conservatives there but out numbered, and telling them to move if they don't like it is simply juvenile

Either you’re not thinking clearly, or you’re lying. These two comments...

“It was doctors who sunk medicare. They should have seen it as a flawed system and not grown dependent on it”

“doctors had better figure out that government and insurance pays them and if they don’t like it they can do something else”

...are contradictory. The first says doctors shouldn’t have worked with medicare and the second says doctors should accept that government pays them.

And to say that “government and insurance pays them” is even more incoherent—it shows you favor the merging of private and public insurance systems.