Medical Care Is Serious Business
Stanley Feld M.D., FACP,MACE
Medical practice and healthcare policy are on a collision course. The politics of progressivism and socialism are dictating the course of medical practice.
Medical practice is a craft practiced between a physician and a patient. The physician patient relationship is the keystone to that craft. Politicians and secondary stakeholders who influence on the healthcare system are destroying the craft.
Obamacare has accelerated the destruction of the physician patient relationship. Obamacare’s goal is to have the government make the decisions for consumers. The freedom of Americans to choice their physicians will disappear.
Why? The Obama administration’s view is that Americans do not have the ability to make the right medical choices.
The concern of healthcare policy makers has been about costs and not the relationship between physicians and patients. They are trying to cut costs.
The problem is they are cutting costs and increasing premiums and taxes on the wrong stakeholders, namely physicians and patients.
Obamacare’s focus is on providing subsidized healthcare insurance for the lowest 20% of the population while it is destroying medical coverage for the other 80% of the population.
Safety net hospitals took care of that 20% of the population that is uninsured.
Many of these safety net hospitals were the best teaching hospitals in the country. Most of these hospitals are teaching hospitals serviced by medical schools.
President Obama has ignored improving the care and the facilities of these safety net hospitals.
Americans are losing their healthcare insurance coverage because of Obamacare’s mandated requirements for healthcare coverage by the private healthcare insurance industry. He should be concentrating what is considered a direct medical care cost.
Employers are avoiding penalty for not providing Obamacare required coverage insurance by cutting full time employees to part-time employees working less than 30 hours a week. This has impacted the full time employment rate. It has also decreased purchasing power of part-time employees.
President Obama did not improve the situation when he unilaterally changed by executive order the law increasing the hours temporarily to 50 hours per week. This new executive order disappears in one year. The uncertainty in the future remains. Employers are still decreasing hiring to less than 30 hours per week.
President Obama has changed the law by direct executive orders 25 times. He has lost the trust of the American public with all his waivers to favored groups and to pressure groups.
The Obamacare waivers have created chaos and uncertainty for all the stakeholders. It is difficult to try to adjust to one set of rules and then find the rules have been indiscriminately changed the next month.
The Obama administration has increased the cost of care. He has not saved an American family $2500 a year as promised. He has cost them an additional $2500 a year.
President Obama has asked Democrats to promise voters that he would fix the flaws in Obamacare. I am convinced he doesn’t know what is basically wrong with Obamacare. He refuses to listen to others and labels them as destructive opponents. He is making thing worse with waivers and uncertainty. These unilateral changes are probably unconstitutional.
In order to talk his way out of the criticism he has been caught in a web of lies. These lies did not appear to the public as lies when he was running for reelection against Governor Romney. However, American citizens get it now.
Governor Romney said Russia is our number one enemy. President Obama and his spin machine ridiculed Romney without presenting any evidence to the contrary.
Now President Obama is telling Democrats to run on Obamacare because he will fix it. He has not presented the plan he will use to fix Obamacare.
How can Democrats running for re-election and voters trust President Obama again to fix the problems in Obamacare?
The effect Obamacare has had on taxes and economic growth has been devastating.
Obamacare is no longer an abstraction. Taxes, higher healthcare premiums and the lack of jobs and economic growth are now directly affecting the middle class and small businesses.
This effect had been predicted during the debate at the time of the bills passage.
President Obama’s taking points are the bill is doing so poorly because of Republican opposition. This is another attack on his opponents without any evidence. The problems with Obamacare are his doing and not the Republicans doing
His “best supporters” such as unions and Hispanics are realizing the devastating effects Obamacare is having on them directing. These groups are now opposing Obamacare.
The truth is Obamacare cannot be fixed. President Obama’s ideology is its biggest barrier.
We are beginning to see the direct affect on Americans of the next catastrophe resulting from Obamacare. The catastrophe is the impending effect on medical care in America.
Americans are going to experience medical care manpower shortages, medical care reimbursement problems, access to care problems and rationing of care problems.
Americans on the east coast and west coast will be directly affected. Most of them will start realizing they can no longer think about Obamacare in theoretical, abstract and intellectual terms.
Repairing the healthcare system and the medical care system must be thought about in realistic and pragmatic terms.
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone
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