I find it absolutely laughable that today there is actually a serious debate, at least among the left, about how we need desperately a socialized, government controlled medicine system to cover the nebulous uninsured. I find it odd because we already have so much socialized medicine in America and we can see it failing all around us. Yes, it is true.
For the better part of the past century our government has been socializing large portions of the American health care system to help out people that, to be blunt, can get insurance but simply do not like the fees the free market dictates that they should have to pay for said service. Medicare and Medicaid are the two biggies. The first was instituted to help out seniors who as a whole have more medical maladies and tend to consume a lot of medical resources thus costing insurers more and also require higher premiums to pay for those higher costs. The latter was was instituted to help people who were of lower income and did not want to spent portions of their income on even the most very basic and inexpensive plans.
Both are also suffering from cronic failures as doctors are refusing to see new patients under the plans and delaying seeing those patients they already have due to lower than market value reimbursement rates for services.
My opinions on both government programs are well known. As federally unconstitutional programs the government has overstepped its bounds and they should be ended. That is if you care about the Constitution. If you don’t, that is fine. Just remember that if you ignore the Constitution on this issue don’t come crying to me when the government does something else unconstitutional that next time harms you. And it will, do not kid yourself.
Anyway, we are on the verge of another cut in the reimbursement rates for doctors seeing patients under Medicare. Yep, the same old failed policy of price controls, a very Sovietesque idea, is killing the program quietly as a 21% cut fee reimbursements looms. Congress is trying to delay the cuts but delaying the cuts will only mean more taxpayer dollars needed to cover them.
Medicare “has no discretion” to avoid the cuts, set for March 1, said Ellen Griffith, a payment specialist at Medicare, in an e-mail. The U.S. average fee for a “mid-level” office visit is $65.67, and Medicare pays 80 percent of the cost.
The uncertainty “makes it very hard for physicians to plan ahead, and some providers will have a cash-flow problem,” said Mark B. McClellan, a physician and health-care analyst at the Brookings Institution, a policy research foundation in Washington.
“Most physicians probably won’t close their doors to Medicare patients immediately, but they’ll have concerns that they can’t continue operating that way,” said McClellan, a former chief of Medicare and the Food and Drug Administration.
No, they probably won’t. Most doctors will undoubtedly hang on as long as they can but eventually the laws of economics are going to catch up to everyone from the doctors, to the patients to the government bureaucrats and members of Congress. Government can mandate that bread be only $0.50 a loaf on the supermarket shelf but it if costs $1.00 to bring that loaf of bread to the shelf in the first place there will eventually be either no bread or much, much smaller loaves that require the consumer to buy twice as many to get the same number of slices and saving no one nothing.
The problems with socialized medicine here in America have been accumulating for years and have been coming to a head:
A 21 percent payment cut for Medicare physicians, set to begin next week, led Michael Bell to delay appointments for his elderly patients by four months.
…
Bell, the Tennessee doctor, said in a phone interview yesterday that he reduced his Medicare appointments 20 percent to brace for the cuts. Even if Congress steps in, Bell says, Medicare pays too little.
“For the past few years, we’ve had only a zero to maybe 1 percent raise in fees, while our expenses go up at least 4 to 5 percent each year,” Bell said. “So we’ve fallen behind, and that’s about as much as we can handle.”
Bell says he now gets about $34.52 for an office visit from Medicare for his patients.
The Mayo Clinic, praised by Obama as a national model for efficient health care, said it would stop taking Medicare patients at its primary-care clinic in Glendale, Arizona, starting Jan. 1, saying the U.S. government pays too little.
How much longer are we going to livethis lie? It is killing us and it is time to get off the socialist medicine bandwagon. It simply does not work and no number of new socialized medical programs will save us from the ultimate failings of such an ill conceived idea.
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