Making a Bad Situation Worse: AKA Government
Yet another unintended consequence of ObamaCare:
In the Inland Empire, an economically depressed region in Southern California, President Obama’s health care law is expected to extend insurance coverage to more than 300,000 people by 2014. But coverage will not necessarily translate into care: Local health experts doubt there will be enough doctors to meet the area’s needs. There are not enough now.
You’ll see this situation replicated all over the nation, as our medical corps doesn’t grow fast enough to meet the needs of an aging population. Hell, the overall number of doctors might shrink in absolute terms, as our best-and-brightest seek more remunerative fields as ObamaCare squeezes doctors’ paychecks.
Congratulations: You have coverage. The bad news is, you don’t have care.
The irony here is that the whole “Health Insurance” thing was started in the inland empire:
http://xnet.kp.org/newscenter/aboutkp/historyofkp.html
file under “no good deed goes unpunished”
I can see it now, DRAFTING undergrads into Med School. And FORCING them to practice where and when and for how much and how long the Gubmint says. Medical PEONAGE.
Brave New World.
Imagine the kind of care you’d get from an unwilling draftee.
Even worse, imagine the care you’d get from a willing one.
Kate at smalldeadanimals.com has a recurring theme:
The dirty little secret of socialized health care – nobody needs to be a doctor!
(Of course, she discounts the notion of conscription as being unworkable for all the reasons cited here. But then as Solyndra et al demonstrate, unworkability is just an outdated bourgeois notion, irrelevant to the progressive ideal, yes?)
Truth beats fiction once again.
No choice in your medical specialty was a provision of the original Hillarycare. That’s right. Your Betters in Washington were going to crunch the numbers over a big ol’ map and if you wanted to specialize in Sports Medicine but there weren’t enough people entering Ophthalmology that year, guess what? You’re going into Ophthalmology! Hillary even snappishly defended this in one of her public speeches at a medical school.
Here in the flyover country of Canada, the lost 1500 miles between Toronto and Winnipeg, this is already the case. My doctor of 40 years retired and I am unable to find another. Our healthcare system is a joke and Canada is the ONLY country in the world that will not allow you to spend money out of your onw pocket on healthcare. Be afraid.
one thing that you will see to ease any shortage of MDs is the continuing use of nurse clinicians, nurse practioners and physicians assistants. while once considered “physician extenders” and working under the supervision of MDs they now practice alone and and unsupervised in some states (different states treat them differently).what will happen is that the entry to the lower levels of care(both for the patient and provider) will ease, as will the expectations of the quality given, but the entrance to the upper reaches, as well as the regulations on and the expectations of said upper reaches, will get increasingly stricter. a tiered system.
in addition, some states will require that the provider must take the non-paying patient as a condition of receiving a license to practice.
the increasing regulations will lead to an increase in office support staff, the cost of which can not be passed on.
ultimately, there will be a bottom tier of poorly trained “primary care givers” that are easily accessible and relatively worthless. there will be another tier, powerful, wealthy and located in the big cities and controlled by the big networks.
there will be no middle tier as it will become financially impossible to sustain. look also for more high tech which will have both good and bad aspects to it.
radiology is already being outsourced and pathology will follow. physical examination is being replaced with lab and x-ray, which will increase despite the expense, because the public demands it and physical diagnoses is a dying art.
some ivory tower idiot will decide (again) that if we change to three years in medical school, training will be cheaper and we will get more doctors, missing the point that only one graduating class is gained an the failure to graduate rate will eat that up in no time. been there, done that.
all of this has already happened and will get worse, not better.
The American Dream is here! (We recommend that you learn to thank your doctor in his/her language.)
Anyone got a few dozen million dollars and looking for a growth industry to invest in? Go to Costa Rica or some other Caribbean paradise with decent infrastructure, and build a surgical resort. We’ll have lots of wealthy, aging boomers more than happy to escape the end-game of Obamacare, and needing various surgeries and procedures. Give them private rooms, and a resort wing with pools and bars for their kids and grandkids to stay at and visit them. As a bonus, you’ll probably get to use cutting edge stem-cell therapies and genetic manipulations that haven’t made it through the FDA approval process yet (but are keeping ‘em spry in Hong Kong and Tel Aviv.) Think you’ll have much trouble recruiting doctors? Think the island government would be willing to set up favorable malpractice laws to get the revenue? Then bypass insurance companies, and set real upfront prices.
I like.
There will have to be either a strong enough police force, or a private mercenary force available for hire, to keep the system from being strong-armed by the local warlords. Otherwise, the narco-terrorists will eventually get their grubby paws in the pool and ruin it for everyone.
Heh, I’ve been projecting this for a while, except even closer: Mexico. Right now, resorts chopper visitors directly in from San Diego for golf, scuba, disco, and luxury. No need to set foot one in the real Mexico. Should be a snap to do it with surgical facilities. Lawmakers, labor bosses, and liberal celebrities will be among the first patients.
No, contact that Indian nations. They have their own laws. Instead of casinos, they could have a whole shadow medical system scattered around the country!
Gee, if only we had some kind of system which would provide everybody information about the relationship between supply and demand and would reward those who, when supply was insufficient, could increase supply or reduce demand.
We could call it a “market,” from the Sanskrit for “bloody brilliant idea”