California docs say No Thanks to Obamacare

California was one of the biggest boosters of the disaster known as the Affordable Care Act. They were so happy to support it that Obama used California’s exchange system as proof that it was working ((President touts Obamacare’s success in California)). There was just a few problems with that.

No one thought to ask the doctors what they thought of being paid less then what it cost them to see a patient. Now California is finding out the hard way. Fully 70% of California doctors are refusing to take patients who get their insurance through Obamacare or its California version, Cover California. This has the Moonbats all in a tizzy. They didn’t realize that doctors might not take kindly to being bankrupted by Obamacare. Here are a few details from the Los Angeles Times:

As the state moves to expand healthcare coverage to millions of Californians under President Obama’s healthcare law, it faces a major obstacle: There aren’t enough doctors to treat a crush of newly insured patients.

Oops! So what will they do about this? Train more doctors? Pay them what their time is actually worth? You are joking, right? This is California. They never do anything that makes sense.

Some lawmakers want to fill the gap by redefining who can provide healthcare. They are working on proposals that would allow physician assistants to treat more patients and nurse practitioners to set up independent practices. Pharmacists and optometrists could act as primary care providers, diagnosing and managing some chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high-blood pressure.

“We’re going to be mandating that every single person in this state have insurance,” said state Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), chairman of the Senate Health Committee and leader of the effort to expand professional boundaries. “What good is it if they are going to have a health insurance card but no access to doctors?”

And you are just now thinking about this? I’ve gone into this before. While there are things that these non-doctors can do, and in some cases they do have some of the training they need, most people are going to question the type of treatment they are going to get from a physician’s assistant. What happens if they make a bad diagnosis and either prescribe the wrong medication or miss something all together? Have they forgotten just how lawsuit happy this country is?

Hernandez’s proposed changes, which would dramatically shake up the medical establishment in California, have set off a turf war with physicians that could contribute to the success or failure of the federal Affordable Care Act in California.

Turf war is an understatement.

Doctors say giving non-physicians more authority and autonomy could jeopardize patient safety. It could also drive up costs, because those workers, who have less medical education and training, tend to order more tests and prescribe more antibiotics, they said.

“Patient safety should always trump access concerns,” said Dr. Paul Phinney, president of the California Medical Assn.

Please! Obamacare has already started killing people ((OBAMACARE KILLED MY SISTER by Doug Graham)). Patient safety is the absolute last thing on the minds of the Progressive Liberal Democrats. Anyone who has looked at what “wonderful health insurance” they will get through Obamacare or the exchanges knows that it’s absolute garbage. Massive increases in premiums and deductibles that frankly will bankrupt people looking for medical care.

As the nation’s earliest and most aggressive adopter of the healthcare overhaul, California faces more pressure than many states. Diana Dooley, secretary of the state Health and Human Services Agency, said in an interview that expanding some professionals’ roles was among the options policymakers should explore to help meet the expected demand. At a meeting of healthcare advocates in December, she had offered a more blunt assessment.

“We’re going to have to provide care at lower levels,” she told the group.

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m5NvP_bya0′]

And there it is. People will not get the medical care they once did thanks to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and of course, Barack Obama. We have a crisis on our hands. It isn’t just Obamacare, there is also the problem of doctors leaving the profession. Many are coming up on retirement and quite a few have just given up because of all the regulations and the need to practice “Defensive Medicine ((defensive medical decision making)).” Defensive medicine is the practice of doctors ordering more tests then they really think are needed solely to protect themselves from rapacious lawyers. One of the major causes in the escalation of medical costs are lawyers such as John Edwards ((John Edwards Legal Career)) coming in and second guessing medical professionals solely for their own personal profit.

Doctors have had enough and they aren’t going to take it anymore. According to Liberty News Online:

California offers one of the lowest government reimbursement rates in the country — 30 percent lower than federal Medicare payments. And reimbursement rates for some procedures are even lower. In other states, Medicare pays doctors $76 for return-office visits. But in California, Medi-Cal’s reimbursement is $24, according to Dr. Theodore M. Mazer, a San Diego ear, nose and throat doctor. And when your service costs more to deliver than you are being paid, guess what? Two things happen: you opt out of that lousy reimbursement system, or you retire. In California and elsewhere, Obamacare is forcing physicians to make precisely those choices, which will mean less access for a much higher patient load.

And as people who signed up for Obamacare are now finding out, many of the doctors listed as being in the network actually aren’t.

“Some physicians have been put in [California’s] network and they were included basically without their permission,” Lisa Folberg, CMA’s vice president of medical and regulatory policy, told the Examiner.
“They may be listed as actually participating, but not of their own volition,” added Donald Waters, executive director of the Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Association. “This is a dirty little secret that is not really talked about as they promote Covered California,” Waters continued, calling the state exchange’s physician members list a “shell game,” because “the vast majority” of them are not participating.

As you might expect, the California bureaucrats are in utter denial.

Covered California officials discount any reports that most of the state’s doctors will likely stay away. In fact, the Washington Examiner reported, the exchange believes that 85 percent of the state’s doctors will participate.

And if you like your doctor, you can keep him, except that Obama and the others outright lied and you can’t. Doctors will not participate if they are going to be financially ruined by Obamacare and Cover California.

That may not coincide with reality, however. And besides, again – merely signing up for health insurance through an Obamacare exchange could be meaningless. Some docs moving to ‘cash only’ – taking no insurance at all. “Patients should welcome this development. Not only does the move toward direct payment have the potential to reduce health costs – it could also yield higher-quality care,” writes Sally Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute, for Forbes in April.

This was how medicine was handled forever. You were sick, you went to the doctor, he treated you and you paid him. If you didn’t have the money, they would usually work something out with you. That’s where the joke came regarding paying your doctor with chickens and goats. Back in the day, that was how it was done.

Now that the “Chickens are coming home to roost” as it were, and doctors are telling Obama and the Progressive Liberal Democrats to go pound sand, the Progressive Liberal Democrats are starting to show their true colors and essentially enslave physicians. Here are a few items from the Mason Conservative:

You would think that when your party is burying a hole that is getting harder and harder to get out of, you wouldn’t want to that hole get deeper faster. But here is Kathleen Murphy, Democrat running for the House of Delegates against Barbara Comstock, telling a forum in Great Falls that she believes it should law to force doctors to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients. Forced by government decree, mind you. A birdie sent me this:

FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.

She did not recognize that the payments are inadequate to cover the doctors’ costs. She also did not recognize there is a shortage of over 45,000 physicians now and that it is forecast to be 90,000 in a few years.

Democrats appear to want to make physicians slaves of the state, but Democrats don’t admit they would just drive more doctors out of practice into retirement and other occupations. The Obamacare law and regulations are causing millions of people to lose their health insurance, drop many doctors and hospitals. The HHS internal forecast is 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance due to the Obamacare law and rules about adequacy of insurance.

As you might expect, the Obama Propaganda Machine, formally the Obama Steno Pool and before that, the Main Stream Media have completely ignored what Progressive Liberal Democrat Kathleen Murphy and others want to do. If ordered to comply, many doctors will simply hand in their licenses and walk away. Perhaps they will become consulting detectives ((Joan Watson)) for various police departments. What will the Progressive Liberal Democrats do then? Handcuff doctors to their examination tables? Considering their mindset, I wouldn’t put it past them.

Obamacare is a disaster of criminal proportions. I think it might even rise to the level of a crime against humanity. People are going to die and I can say it’s a good bet that when someone is denied medical care by some bureaucrat, especially if it is a family member or child, that bureaucrat will end up looking down the barrel of a gun. When the government pushes normally good people into a corner, they will react and in ways that will terrify them. Remember in November and get rid of anyone who supported this disaster at any level of government.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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