An Alaska plastic surgeon is closing down his practice after 38 years, blaming ♡bamaCare!!!, Medicaid, and Medicare for his decision:
“It is an unsustainable system,” Dr. Wennen wrote to his customers in a letter obtained by The Daily Caller. “I am personally writing off upwards of three quarters of a million dollars annually in free/uncompensated care.”
“My reasons for closing down the office are simply economic,” Wennen wrote. “The governmental agencies that are supplying ‘medical insurance’ to the elderly, the disadvantaged, the indigent and the sick, injured, or disabled have placed an unrealistically low value of worth on physician’s services.”
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“Within the last month, Fairbanks has lost three other much respected physicians for the same or similar reasons,” Dr. Wennen wrote. ”I am not the first and certainly will not be the last of the exodus of physicians from active practice because of all of this.”
After nearly 40 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if Dr. Wennen hadn’t been considering retiring for a while already, but that doesn’t mean his experience in dealing with government medicine isn’t indicative of something else we may be about to endure.
Medicine has long attracted some of the best and brightest, thanks to high pay based on real benefits to their patients resulting from rare and difficult skills.
What kind of person will be attracted to the medical field in the future, when the pay is lower and the results are worse?
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