The Washington Examiner:
An estimated seven out of every 10 physicians in deep-blue California are rebelling against the state’s Obamacare health insurance exchange and won’t participate, the head of the state’s largest medical association said..
Hey, who needs doctors when you’ve got ObamaCare?
Related: ObamaCare’s Massachusetts exchange has signed up zero people.
Should work out just fine. Obama will be making house calls?
This can’t be so… isn’t the magic negro in the WH like… magic or something? “Hope@ Change”. I do have sympathy for the millions of Americans who weren’t fooled by the media’s magic telepromtor reading candidate, Obullshitter… as for the rest, suck it up buttercup, you voted for it live with it.
Shocking, nobody could ever have seen that coming! Sheesh, if you’ve lost California (which is lost enough as it is) then you’re really screwed.
If only these robot media morons would have said something a couple years ago instead of waiting until it’s too late..oh yeah, they’re in on it too as usual.
Wait till they make Doctors participate mandatory by Law.
Than comes the Unions. The bureaucrats.
The newly created medical departments for oversight.
Than comes the empty medical schools as Doctors become government employees , not physicians.Lastly the third world witch doctors to replace the dearth of western trained medical personnel. Boy are Americans in for one whopping surprise.Particularly when “medicine” becomes a public Union.
I see that Obozocare is proposing to pay California physicians at rates which are close to what they get in Canada. Right now, the remuneration for an office visit in BC is $28.90 which is not that much different from the $24 that they’re proposing to pay doctors in CA. Unlike Canada, CA doctors can ask for an additional fee above the $24 they’d be getting from Obozocare.
To be fair, US doctors do have greater expenses. Looked at malpractice premiums for a GP in FL and it was in the neighborhood of $30 K/year. Here in BC I pay about $1800 yearly. Still, in talking with my FL taxi driver who is rock solid in terms of picking me up when it’s time for me to catch my ridiculously early morning flight, he pays $150 for a walkin clinic visit (which, he sheepishly explained, is why he was asking me all those medical questions during the ride to the airport). I had naively assumed that a $150 charge for a visit meant a long appointment but that’s the rate for a 5 minute visit for an antibiotic Rx. At least the antibiotic Rx in the US is way way cheaper than in Canada with pharmacies often competing and giving free prescriptions for generic drugs if one buys more than a minimum amount of groceries.
One good thing about this is that CA physicians will finally see what socialized medicine looks like. The only way to make money in a socialized medical system is to crank people through a practice as fast as possible; something patients detest. In Canada, the last thing a physician wants to do is to give patients time to fully explain why they’ve come in – consistent with good medicine but financial suicide for the physician. In Vancouver, physicians ensure lots of short visits occur by giving only one month of Rx drugs which means that patients need to make 12 visits/year to get their prescriptions. Here in the interior, the lack of physicians is so severe that the average Rx is for a year which is the maximum that Pharmacare will allow. I’ve had very annoyed patients in Vancouver ask if they could pay me to fill an Rx over the phone which I can’t do because of the medicare protection act. So, the patient who’s working and who’s time is worth as much as mine has to drive to his Vancouver doctor, pay exorbitant parking (I think the parking in my building was $7.50/30 minutes), wait an hour if the doctor is running late, and then get a simple prescription as this is the only way for a physician to survive under socialized medicine. I’m really hoping that Dr. John Day will destroy the BC governments case against him given a SCC decision that current medical wait lists are unconstitutional. Doesn’t stop the BC government moonbats from wasting the taxpayers money in fighting Dr. Day’s provision of a badly needed service which the WCB and BC prisons take full advantage of with the government of BC’s blessing.
The good thing about the US medical system, even though it is close to FUBAR, is that people there are used to getting what they want if they have the money. Canadian sheeple have been largely conditioned to believe that we have the best medical system in the world (well, better than that of N. Korea and Cuba, the only two countries that share the same form of socialized medicine). In the US people will be very pissed off and maybe the shakeup will get rid of Obozo as well as the byzantine US insurance system which is so bad that several of my classmates who moved to the US moved back to Canada as, in their opinion, dealing with brainless insurance companies was no different than dealing with brainless government bureaucrats and the malpractice premiums are less in Canada.
Obozo is going to find out that it’s damn hard to run a medical system without doctors, especially in the days of widespread medical information on the internet. The Chicoms could get away with barefoot doctors whose only medical reference was the little red book of chairman Mao as there were no computers or internet in that era. Private medicine will proliferate and the current system in the US does do a good job of taking care of poor people. I work with a physician who’s a rabid socialist and did make good on his promise to leave the US if George Bush was elected. He’s worked in the US primarily in very low cost clinics which provided health care to people without insurance. We don’t discuss politics as we know better than try to change each others views and he’s a competent physician and we work well together. He’s not heading back to the US given that he detest insurance companies and bureaucratic stupidity (that would seem to be the epitome of socialism but we’ve agreed not to discuss politics). Under private medicine in the US, there was a sliding scale of payment where one could treat some people for free and then “soak the rich”. This would appear to no longer be an option if one has a one size fits all system. Expect lots of US doctors to be moving north, especially the ones who think they can get by on the mere pittance that medicare pays.
The other side of the US medical system is the exorbitant medical bills that people get for emergency visits where the average cost/suture is about $500. The level of overbilling by emergency departments represents extortion in my opinion. (JS hospitals prefer the term “profit center” for ER’s). Being rather frugal myself, I would consider it excessive to bill $2000 for an emergency visit where the nature of the visit involved a deep cut which required 4 sutures to close. Right now I don’t do a lot of suturing given that crazy glue is so much faster to use, and much more convenient for facial lacerations in kids. In 1983, I had an ER visit to a hospital in Seattle for a viral gastroenteritis which cost me $150. I got away cheap and never paid for my $7 sandwich which I never got and, given that the reason I went to the ER was because I couldn’t stop puking, I would have been unable to eat. Apparently that same visit today would cost a person on the order of $3000 given that bags of 1 liter of intravenous normal saline are billed at about $300/apiece.
What I get in Canada for sewing up a laceration which takes a bit more time than an average clinic visit is $50. If I had to pay more than this personally, especially if the laceration was in an area I could reach myself, I’d put in my own stitches to save money and have done so in the past.
Excellent comment Loki. Very insightful.
A trusted Insurance agent is invited into your home and the first thing he/she sits down to tell you is to cancel your existing policies because his/her company has a bigger, better deal, and a cheaper price. lol
In my state it is known as ‘Twisting’ look it up.
Loss of insurance licenses and a possible felony if the client dies.
–
Our insurance salesman and thief chief now knows that his medicaid built for everyone is not working, soooo,
we need his peace with Iran to soothe our weary minds.
Many of us knew years ago this Insurance salesman thief chief couldn’t sell electric cars,
and now I wouldn’t buy an apple from this crook.
Looks like most of the doctors are not buying it either.
Good thing its Sunday, or I would tell you what I really think..
Thanks Loki. Great post.
MM
premiums up, pay outs down, would appear there is a black hole sucking up all the money that ain’t going to medical purposes!
Here’s why Massachusetts has signed up zero people…
http://rightreactions.blogspot.com/2013/12/apply-now_7.html
Stitching yourself up is pretty hard core. I don’t think I could do that even if I knew how.
That was a great post Loki. It is interesting when someone who knows how it all works explains it in layman’s terms.
It is also interesting that your fellow physician, considering his disgust with bureaucrats, continues to support socialism? It gives pause to consider how a brain actually functions in the face of truth.
Do you mean, B. Hussien’s biggest failure so far? ’cause he’s got another 3 years to surpass this idiocy and the fallout from the agreement with Iran hasn’t begun yet.
butterfly stitches across forehead from puck damage. no scars either. just gotta have some balls!!
Loki you are a practicing medical doctor?
Loki, One of the reasons the ER billings are so steep is cross subsidization from the uninsured working poor, illegals, and indigent using the ERs as walk-in clinics. They can’t be legally refused service even though they have no intention of paying, whether or not they can afford it. Many of these folks qualify for Medicaid but are too lazy or ignorant to fill out the paperwork. That really won’t change under Obamacare as the IRS won’t be chasing those folks.
The best hope for US (until outlawed) and Canadian (if ever allowed) health care is concierge medicine thereby avoiding all third parties. For those unfamiliar, this is where the practitioners accept patients directly and only for cash or ongoing fees, a revolutionary concept called free enterprise.
Obamacare parody – put to the tune of the Kenny Rogers song…
http://cafehayek.com/2013/12/you-picked-a-fine-time-to-leave-me-blue-shield.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+CafeHayek+(Cafe+Hayek)
I can’t stand the fact that the government health care plans are called “Exchanges” It gives me trepidation that O has future plans of some government run stock exchange to give ownership of corporations to his core constituency ala Mugabe style indigenization policy.
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