Obamacare Howler
From the WSJ, about a Medicare flyer sent to seniors worried about cuts, reassuring them that "The Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama this year will provide you and your family greater savings and increased quality health care":
That's the first sentence of the four-page mailer, and it gives a flavor of the Administration's respect for the public's intelligence. It goes on to mention "improvements to Medicare Advantage," the program that Democrats hate because it gives nearly one out of four seniors private health insurance options. "If you are in a Medicare Advantage plan, you will still receive guaranteed Medicare benefits."But that's not what Medicare's own actuary thinks. In an April memo, Richard Foster estimated that the $206 billion hole in Advantage will reduce benefits, cause insurers to withdraw from the program and reduce overall enrollment by half. Doug Elmendorf and his team at the Congressional Budget Office came to the same conclusion, as did every other honest expert.
That's also what Humana told its customers, warning that seniors "could lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare Advantage so valuable." Medicare threatened the Kentucky-based company with fines and regulatory punishments for "misleading and confusing" beneficiaries, then issued a blanket gag order on Advantage insurers. The agency later backed down, once its Cosa Nostra message had been signed, sealed and delivered.
However anyone wants to spin this, a least two doctors have called in to a dominant local talk show and stated on the air that they will not be seeing Medicare patients, period. Each was vague about the cutoff date because of expenses and commitments to existing patients, but cut off they will be.
Lesson lost: you cannot make people lose money, just because you print it and you've forgotten what it is to run out of it.
Radwaste at May 28, 2010 2:33 AM
It's rather hard, apparently, to find a Dr to take medicaid here in Austin. How people think this bill is going to change that, I don't know. But plenty of stupid people do seem to believe exactly that.
momof4 at May 28, 2010 5:40 AM
mom: they'll do it the way fascists do everything - brute force.
Expect this - the Medicare Access Improvement Act of 2013. Among its provisions will be a requirement that doctors carry at least 25% of their patient roster as medicare/medicaid patients as a condition of their license.
Which simply means that we'll have fewer doctors, or we'll start importing them from countries like Pakistan where the bulk of the population hates us.
brian at May 28, 2010 5:57 AM
You get what you pay for. If the government is paying for the doctor, expect the doctor to figure out who the paying customer is pretty quickly.
MarkD at May 28, 2010 7:03 AM
Let's hope they don't pack their parachutes too!
Feebie at May 28, 2010 9:40 AM
Crap. Wrong thread. Par-dohhhn-A-moi!
Feebie at May 28, 2010 9:40 AM
On behalf of my American friends who care about their future . . . "I can see November from my front porch!"
Robert W. (Honolulu) at May 28, 2010 12:38 PM
Government Management of Doctors
Fred: I dreamed of being a doctor, and earned my M.D.
Mike: I'm puzzled. Why are you managing a government department?
Fred: As a doctor, I realized I was mostly managing a government department. This way, I get paid to do it, and I go home at 4:00.
Medicare has degraded to the point where reimbursements minus imposed costs are not enough to support doctors. The true, awful promise of Obamacare is to make this worse. Medical prices have been grossly distorted along the way, with more distortions to come.
Doctors are moving away from Medicare just as Obamacare tries to provide all services as in Medicare.
Intrusive laws and "free-care" requirements are changing medicine from a vocation to just a job. Do we want doctors, or bureaucrats who don't mind practicing medicine on the side?
Andrew_M_Garland at May 28, 2010 2:44 PM
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