Quote:
Originally Posted by DDoug
In respects to Obamacare he was smart to send it to the supreme court. They will find it to be ok the bad part is it will not be able to repeal it. Maybe in 20 years. I had some people from Canada stay at the hotel and the lady worked for the government and they said you better hope that the bill would not pass. This was in2010. They told me it will take them one to two years to get a medical problem taken care. Her husband had a heart condition and he said if he had waited for the process in Canada he would have died. They came to the states and paid for the surgery and was fine. This is the problem with Obamacare or any government health care program,........We dont matter anymore we're getting old not a lot of time left help the young ones out because they cant vote yet. Of course if the worst happens,and it probably will the kids wont know ant different anyway, we will be gone and what do we care. That is the attitude I am seeing now days. Sorry if I offend any one.
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Getting a shiny new "free" insurance card from the federal government does not mean there is a doctor who can take on new patients and actually see you. None of the politicians is talking about the shortage of primary-care physicians across the country.
Increasing the number of medical school graduates does nothing to help the problem when there are not enough residency-training slots in which they must get trained in teaching hospitals. Residency training is funded by Medicare, and Medicare is being cut....with smaller cuts already being made, the new healthcare law to cut $248 billion from Medicare over 10 years. The article linked explains the problem with too little funding for residency training slots for the increasing number of medical school graduates.
Massachusetts learned quickly the results of having too few primary care doctors (more E.R. visits--the most costly place to treat routine maladies--because patients could not get an appointment with a primary dr., and higher costs and insurance premiums).....
while MA has the highest number of physicians per patient than any other state! Having an insurance card does not mean a doctor can take you, and the ones we know and have had are already so overworked that they're looking at retiring--they're TIRED, and are fed up with being told what they can do by a bureaucrat reading from a medicare or insurance company computer screen.
This is not to say that major changes are not needed, nor to keep the status quo. The system
does need
financing overhaul. But the problem coming is the probable wreckage of the good care most Americans DO have, because of the financing problems politicians are only worsening.
"Medicare covers a portion of the cost of training a resident by paying teaching hospitals based on how many Medicare patients use the hospitals. The hospital then has to come up with the balance of the cost, which differs depending on the region.
The amount of money Medicare pays to hospitals has been frozen for nearly 15 years and more residency slots have not been created in many states....."
See:
http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee....html?page=all
"...Obama’s proposal to cut $248 billion from Medicare over 10 years includes $1 billion in trims to teaching hospitals, which could lead to fewer residency slots for doctor training programs....
Hospitals spend about $13 billion annually to train residents, Grover said. That breaks down to about $145,000 per resident, including the average first-year salary of $46,000, he said.
‘Tremendous Costs’
“Teaching hospitals carry tremendous additional costs to provide training,” said Sam Hawgood, medical school dean at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s not simply hiring a resident and putting them to work. A huge amount of infrastructure is required.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...r-funding.html