Greg Scandlen:
A few days ago Scott Gottleib and Zeke Emmanuel co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times pooh-poohing the concern about physician shortages.
So certain are they that conventional wisdom is wrong that the piece is headlined, “No, There Won’t be a Doctor Shortage.” Right, and “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan – period.” Somehow such bold assertions have lost a bit of their luster over the past few months.
Now, they acknowledge that an aging population and the prospect of 30 million newly insured people may make it seem like there might be a problem, and the Association of American Medical Colleges says their members aren’t able to train enough physicians to fill the need, but what do they know about physician supply? Gottleib and Emmanuel know better.
As Exhibit One, they look at Massachusetts. They write:
Take Massachusetts, where Obamacare-style reforms were implemented beginning in 2006, adding nearly 400,000 people to the insurance rolls. Appointment wait times for family physicians, internists, pediatricians, obstetricians and gynecologists, and even specialists like cardiologists, have bounced around since but have not appreciably increased overall, according to a Massachusetts Medical Society survey.
That is a wild mischaracterization of the Medical Society’s research. The press release about the 2013 survey quotes Dr. Ronald Dunlop, president of the group, as saying:
Our latest survey once again points out a critical characteristic of health care in the Commonwealth. While we’ve achieved success in securing insurance coverage for nearly all of our residents, coverage doesn’t guarantee access to care. The concern is that limited and delayed access can lead to undesirable results, as people will seek more costly care at emergency rooms, delay care too long, or not seek care at all.
He doesn’t sound as complacent as Gottleib and Emmanuel. The release goes on to say:
The 2013 study shows wait times for new patient appointments with primary care physicians remain long in the Commonwealth, with the average time to see a family medicine physician at 39 days (down from 45 days in 2012) and the average wait time to see an internal medicine physician at 50 days (up from 44 days in 2012).
Of course looking at Massachusetts in a vacuum doesn’t tell us much. In 2009, Merritt-Hawkins conducted a study comparing the waiting times to see a specialist in Boston after its health law and compared the results to other major cities in the United States. It found:
One of the doctors who testified on the Hill today is a neurologist.
He pointed out that he is being dropped from all the plans on the exchanges because his bottom line price is too high.
Not his personal fee, mind you, but rather the treatments that work.
He points out that, in his specialty, people need MRIs all the time.
MRIs are expensive.
And, patients may find only one or two medications work to stabilize their condition.
Sometimes the medications that work are VERY expensive.
ObamaCare won’t cover them.
At all.
I guess we will have a whole bunch of people who were functioning, productive members of society suddenly disabled and in need of being cared for instead.
This doctor is not quitting, but hoping for a ”fix,” that enables his patients to get the care they need to remain able-bodied.
We’ll see.
Today Obama made a new ”fix.”
He asked insurers if they might pay for whatever doctor people are seeing come January, seeing as how his system isn’t up yet at a cost of only over a billion dollars!
@Nanny G: I am sure that this situation only applies to those “substandard plans” that Greg keeps referring to in his comments and unconditional support of Obamacare.
Medicaid payments to my inpatient group are now down to 14% of what it costs us to care for the patients. The private insurance companies pay higher costs for the care we deliver to their patients so we can try to cover the losses from caring for medicaid patients. Yet under obamacare somehow the costs for insurance are going up, while payments to the people providing the actual medical care are going down. This means that the higher cost of health insurance is due not from providing better or more care, but solely to cover the expense of the added bureaucracy of 159 new governmemt agencies.
This is insane. Stop the leftist madness.