Obamacare is having serious trouble as I have discussed. The success stories, like California, are an example of what I have called Medicaid for All.
“It’s a total contradiction in terms to spend your public time castigating Medicaid as something that never should have been expanded for poor people and as a broken, problem-riddled system, and then turn around and complain about the length of time to enroll people,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a member of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, which advises Congress.
Most of the new enrollees are Medicaid members and those enrolled in “private insurance” learn that they have severely restricted choice of doctor or hospital.
Now we have a new development.
John Foust, a Democrat running for the 10th congressional seat in Northern Virginia, is — like Gov. Terry McAuliffe and other state Democrats — gung-ho to expand Medicaid. His wife’s position is, shall we say, a bit more nuanced.
Foust has slammed his opponent, Republican Del. Barbara Comstock, for her opposition to expansion. He has spoken of the need to “make health care available to 400,000 Virginians,” insisting it is “the right thing to do.”
Foust’s wife, Dr. Marilyn Jerome, practices with Foxhall OB/GYN in northwest Washington, D.C. Six of its physicians made Washingtonian magazine’s list of “Top Docs, and one of them — Nichole Pardo — was featured on the cover. Not too shabby.
The practice is notable for another reason as well: It doesn’t accept Medicaid patients.
Now what ?
On his website, Foust blasts insurance companies that “hiked insurance premiums and gouged consumers. … Insurance companies denied care to those with pre-existing conditions … and refused coverage to those who needed it most. … We cannot go back to the days when insurance companies could arbitrarily … deny coverage.” In a commentary on the Foxhall practice’s website, Dr. Jerome praises the Affordable Care Act — particularly because now “women cannot be denied insurance” and because the plan’s standards mandate coverage for a wide variety of treatments.
Doctors, however, can operate under a much different set of standards. They can deny care all they want. Statewide, roughly one in five physicians will not accept new Medicaid patients — usually because Medicaid pays only two-thirds as much as private insurance does, on average.
My experience, which is 20 years old, is that Medicaid (MediCal in California) pays a lot less than 2/3 as much and it takes two years to get that.
Abiding by the individual mandate therefore constitutes what President Obama, in another context, recently called “economic patriotism.” He was castigating companies that use overseas mergers to avoid U.S. taxes. “You know,” he said, “some people are calling these companies corporate deserters.”
Ominous language. Treating private enterprise as a conscript in service to the State is a philosophy with an ugly lineage. In liberal democracies, government is supposed to be the servant — not the master. In health care, however, the relationship is growing increasingly inverted. As a result individuals are forced to buy insurance, and insurance companies are forced to accept them. Now many people want to force drug companies to cut prices. And so on.
Forcing doctors to accept Medicaid patients would be an obvious, logical extension of these trends. If insurance companies can’t turn people away, then why should physicians be allowed to?
Yes, indeed. This sort of legislation has been introduced in Massachusetts.
[Senate bill 2170 and house bill 4452] would require physicians and all other health care providers to accept 110% of Medicare rates for health insurance for small businesses. For physicians, acceptance of set rates would be as a condition of licensure! Moreover, physicians would have to accept all such patients – and such rates – if they participate in any other plan offered by that insurer.
They are not yet law but it may be coming.
That is not the only problem for medical availability in the future.
FRIDAY, Aug. 1, 2014 (HealthDay News) — A majority of categorical general surgery residents seriously consider leaving residency, according to a study published online July 30 in JAMA Surgery.
Edward Gifford, M.D., from the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, and colleagues anonymously surveyed 371 categorical general surgery residents from 13 residency programs and compared results based on whether or not respondents seriously considered leaving surgical residency. Ten-year attrition rates for each program were also evaluated.
The researchers found that 58.0 percent of respondents seriously considered leaving training. Sleep deprivation on a specific rotation (50.0 percent), an undesirable future lifestyle (47.0 percent), and excessive work hours on a specific rotation (41.4 percent) were the most frequent reasons for wanting to leave. Residents didn’t leave because of support from family or significant others (65.0 percent), support from other residents (63.5 percent), and perception of being better rested (58.9 percent). Serious thoughts of leaving were tied to older age, female sex, postgraduate year, training in a university program, the absence of a faculty mentor, and lack of Alpha Omega Alpha status, although only female sex was significant upon multivariate analysis (odds ratio, 1.2; P = 0.003). High-attrition program residents were more likely to seriously consider leaving residency (odds ratio, 1.8; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.0 to 3.0; P = 0.03).
“Thoughts of leaving seem to be associated with work conditions on specific rotations rather than with overall work hours,” the authors write.
General surgeons are already in short supply. I get emails all the time offering jobs for general surgeons. In contrast to the days when I was in training, general surgery is now a relatively low paid specialty. The artificial joint and cataract surgery options did not exist in 1972.
Welcome to the future.This will not help.
The company knew going in that the learning curve would be steep. It held focus groups last year with nearly 2,000 people and found, for example, that virtually none knew what coinsurance was. (It is the percentage a patient pays for some covered services.) The insurer is putting together a second round of focus groups to see if “we closed the gap any compared to last year,” Ms. Sunshine said.
This is obviously not the group that lost their individual plans last year. All Medicaid.
Tags: economics, health care, medicine, politics