Many Doctors Not Thrilled With Obamacare Coverage

We’ve been talking about the massive failures of the Exchange websites, which are part of the reason there have been so few completed applications where people actually obtain health insurance. But, what happens when people actually get the insurance? How do docs feel about this?

(NY Post) New York doctors are feeling queasy about ObamaCare – and many won’t participate in the new national insurance program because they fear they’ll go broke, The Post has learned.

“ObamaCare is going to send me more patients to see and then cut the payments to provide the care – that’s what’s going to happen,” predicted Donald Moore, a primary-care doctor in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “I will not accept it.”

Moore claims that President Obama made a big mistake by requiring uninsured residents to obtain medical coverage from for-profit insurers through the ObamaCare health exchanges instead of through public health programs like Medicaid.

Under tremendous pressure to keep costs down and profits up, Moore said he’s concerned that commercial insurers will pay doctors less for patient visits and services than either Medicaid or Medicare.

Remember, part of this goes into the mandates and requirement imposed by Obamacare on insurance companies along with all the treatments and visits that will be “free”, meaning the insurance company picks up the tab (hence the reason that so many insurers opted out of the Exchanges). Many doctors will not accept the ACA insurance. Doctors have long been opting out of Medicaid and Medicare or refusing to accept new M/M patients. Most aren’t in business to lose money.

This will drive the ACA patients to community health centers, which aren’t exactly new (Los Federales started giving them money in 1965) but were expanded under O-care. Patients will mostly see patient assistants, rather than doctors. In a lot of case this is just fine. If you have the flu, do you really need a big visit to the doctor? And surely you don’t need to go to the hospital. But these non-profit centers, funded heavily by the Government, will start playing a bigger and bigger part, especially since there is already a doc shortage. Where’s this money coming from? It means the government, and by extension, the taxpaying public, will be picking up a larger and larger share. Look at Oregon

Yesterday I wrote about Oregon’s big success signing people up for Obamacare: The state had, in the course of 17 days, signed up 56,000 people for the health law’s Medicaid expansion. In one fell swoop, the state had cut its uninsured rate by 10 percent.

That is, however, only part of the story from Oregon. When it comes to private insurance, spokeswoman Amy Fauver said that it has not yet had any sign-ups.

That’s right, as of yesterday, there have been no signups for O-care in Oregon. Because their website is such a disaster, they went to paper signups. None have been processed and completed. On day 18. But, moving 56,000 to Medicaid is not a success. It means more and more people under the banner of Government, with the taxpayer picking up most of the tab. And these folks will get, unsurprisingly, substandard care. From an ever shrinking pool of doctors and medical centers.

Just to be clear, O-care opponents had been saying these same things would happen all the way back to before it was passed. No one should be surprised when these things actually start happening.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!