StopBlaming Whitey
Are YOU a victim?
Or are you part of the problem?
[Previous entry: "Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would call him a House Negro"] [Next entry: "Contradictions of Affirmative Action"]
03/04/2010: "Family member of Obama who is a Doctor is against Obamacare!"
Original article can be found here.
ObamaCare: Turning your family doctor into your health care denier
By: Milton R. Wolf, M.D
"A physician and proud defender of liberty."
"It's true, I am President Barack Obama's cousin (second cousin to be exact). That makes me exactly 12% pure hope and I'd like to offer you some."
I may not be the first physician to oppose ObamaCare, but I am the first physician from Barack Obama's own family to oppose ObamaCare. Here is yet another reason why...
ObamaCare contains an insidious provision to financially penalize your doctor if he or she consults a specialist for your medical care.
Scott Gottlieb of the Wall Street Journal explains:
"Primary-care doctors who refer patients to specialists will face financial penalties under the plan. Doctors will see 5% of their Medicare pay cut when their "aggregated" use of resources is "at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization," according to the chairman's mark of Section 3003 of the bill. Doctors will feel financial pressure to limit referrals to costly specialists like surgeons, since these penalties will put the referring physician on the hook for the cost of the referral and perhaps any resulting procedures."
There will be an immediate and obvious consequence.
Sick patients will be denied the care of specialists. It's clear that financially penalizing primary care physicians is an obvious attempt to dissuade them from referring you or your family to the specialist they otherwise conclude you need. Consider the insidious nature of this arbitrary 90th percentile rule: every year, 10% of primary care physicians will be penalized no matter how prudent their referrals were and now matter how many fewer referrals there are this year compared to last. It's irrelevant to the government how badly you need the care of a specialist; only how many of your fellow patients your doctor determined were in need of specialty care. And each subsequent year will be worse than the prior as 100% of primary care physicians will try to avoid being penalized, unmistakably setting the standard of medical care ever lower.
There is another delayed and less obvious consequence.
The sickest patients will be denied the care of all physicians. The most effective method for a primary care physician to stay below the 90th percentile in referrals to specialists would be to simply not accept patients into their practice who are likely to need the care of specialists, if they choose to accept Medicare at all. Thus begins the uncoupling of health care insurance -- in this case, Medicare -- from actual health care. What good is your mother's Medicare card if her doctor won't accept it? Already, 42% of doctors simply won't accept Medicare. ObamaCare will drive that number still higher.
The end game. Big-government statists will ultimately showcase these patients as evidence for the need of even more government intervention. They'll create legions of sick patients without appropriate medical care and then they'll create sympathy for them. Their solution? The so-called public option which will accelerate the process and then, ultimately, a single-payer complete government takeover. They'll claim -- as they always do when unintended consequences inevitably arise -- that these tragedies are the result of capitalism rather than the result of their own government intervention. Always the solution is more government.
These effects are both easily predictable and unquestionably unconscionable. ObamaCare will expressly penalize your doctor for providing you with medical care.
Replies: 1 Comment
on Saturday, March 6th, Q said
This is interesting that this man is a relative of Obama's. Still he makes plain the objectionable nature of Obamacare or should I say Pelosicare.
