A Call To Action : Take Back Your Healthcare: Part 1
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE
Consumers and physicians are starting to fighting to stop President Obama’s misguided healthcare plan as witnessed by the protests throughout the country. Once the American public became aware of the implications of the public option and the costs of the plan they began to distrust President Obama.
It is easy to cook the books by making the wrong assumptions for your calculations. Massachusetts cooked the books with its universal healthcare plan and it has failed. President Obama’s healthcare plan is destined to fail just as Massachusetts’ plan.
Now, Massachusetts is discontinuing its universal healthcare plan. It is creating another plan that will bankrupt the state even further. Massachusetts has already received an $8 billion dollar bailout from the federal government.
Another failure is coming up at taxpayers’ expense. I am publishing the follow essay from a reader who would prefer to remain anonymous.
It is a call to action. The first two parts will be educational.
Consumers: Take Back Your Health CARE.
It’s too important to be trusted to either insurance companies or the government
The BOGUS Schemes proposed by Washington & Massachusetts EXPOSED
Definitions
Health insurance is not health CARE.
Health CARE is what your Doctor does for you.
Health insurance is nothing more than an Insurer’s promise (however slippery) to pay someone else (a doctor / nurse / PT, etc.) to give you CARE.
Yet Congress ignores this fact. Congress is trying to force more insurance on people, when it is CARE everyone really wants to buy.
Insurers have very successfully driven down payment to Doctors, year after year throughout the past twenty years, taking advantage of the fact that Doctors’ practices are small businesses. Many Doctors practice by themselves. This is smaller than small. Practicing medicine is a cottage industry.
No Doctor’s practice meets the definition of a monopoly – no Doctor has 40% or more of Consumers as his / her patients.
Today, Health CARE is not expensive.
But Health Insurance is.
Various Insurers do have a monopoly in many markets throughout the US, and they have used their monopoly power to crush many medical practices.
Yet Insurers have never passed their savings through to Consumers, and state governments have been their accomplices.
States have allowed and in some cases encouraged Insurers to become monopolies. Therein is the root of the out-of-control health insurance cost problem.
Now, some in Massachusetts want to make even more monopoly the law.
After feeding Insurers for years, by requiring every citizen of Massachusetts to become a customer of a health insurance company, Massachusetts finally acknowledged that requiring everyone to buy insurance has done nothing to control cost.
So one month ago, Massachusetts repealed its Universal Healthcare law and turned its attention to the matter of cost control.
Enter Massachusetts’s Health Care Reform Commission, which has proposed that Massachusetts make it illegal for its citizens to deal directly with their doctors and illegal for their doctors to be paid except by Accountable Care Organizations (hospital systems / co-operatives that will assume all financial risk for all care, including physicians, hospital charges and prescription drugs). The Reform Commission wants Massachusetts to effectively outlaw the private practice of Medicine and herd everyone into massive institutions such as the health care co-operatives currently under consideration in Washington.
The Reform Commission wants Massachusetts to pass a law requiring all doctors to become employees of huge hospital systems and be paid an Insurer-dictated “global payment” (capitation).
Doctors, nurses, and allied health practitioners would all now be forced to work for Big Hospitals, which effectively work for Insurance Companies, and not the patient.
Remember the Health Maintenance Organizations of the 1980’s and 1990’s? The healthcare insurance industry profited greatly. Patients experience decrease in access to care and physicians suffered from restrictions to provide adequate care.
Patients and physicians are the weakest link in the healthcare chain even though they are the primary stakeholders.
All politicians have to do is create a complicated plan to “help” the poor, spin a tail about it being the solution, pass a bill and you have created a money making machine for the healthcare insurance industry at the expense of patients.
This is exactly what is happening in Massachusetts all over again.
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone.