Your Medical Future
No CommentsNovember 21, 2009 at 12:36 pmCategory:Health Care
Joseph Stubbs, president of the American College of Physicians — the second-largest doctors' group in the country — confirms that "the supply of doctors just won't be there" for the 30 million new patients. This doctor shortage is "already a catastrophic crisis," Stubbs noted that underserved areas in the U.S. currently need almost 17,000 new primary care physicians even before Obama's proposals are enacted.
In the meantime, according to Bloomberg News, a 2009 survey by Merritt Hawkins & Associates, a recruiting and research firm in Irving, Texas, found that "the average waiting time to see a family-medicine doctor in Boston…is 63 days, the most among the 15 cities" surveyed. By comparison, in Miami, it was only seven days. Boston's longer wait is because of their healthcare reform — the one Obama is copying.
Bloomberg reported that "as many as half of doctors in the state have closed their practices to new patients, forcing many of the newly insured to turn to emergency rooms for care."
Alan Goroll, a professor at Harvard Medical School says that we cannot increase the number of insured unless you have the doctors to treat them all. Makes sense, no?
Indeed, the report found that the Medicare cuts contained in the House-passed bill are likely to "prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether."
As details of the doctor shortage, Medicare cuts, tax increases, penalties for no insurance, shallow subsidies and high costs for the uninsured all leak out, more and more Americans are developing qualms about the bill.
But within Congress, the momentum is the other way as the bill hurtles toward December passage in the Senate — regardless of the facts or common sense.
Of course, they are tyring to lessen the burden of patients upon doctorts by denying care from, the start. See And So It Begins
source: Dick Morris.com
