Category: Investigations

ObamaCare would mean more paperwork and less pay for Medicare providers, many of whom would simply stop treating Medicare patients.

A survey of the British National Health System by the charity Mencap has revealed that there is “institutional discrimination” against patients with learning disabilities in the NHS, the government-run system for which Dr. Donald Berwick — President Obama’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid under ObamaCare — has professed his “love.”

With baby boomer physicians nearing retirement, the United States is likely to face a six-figure shortage of doctors even without the significant increase in demand for health care that ObamaCare would create. But should the health-care overhaul remain in place — spawning greater government control and making a career in medicine less attractive — access to high-quality health care in America would be further reduced.

With statistics showing that an insured person is actually more likely to visit an emergency room than an uninsured person, and with a shortage of primary-care doctors available to service the newly insured, the health care overhaul’s implementation would lead to tens of millions more emergency room visits each year — opposite the result that ObamaCare’s backers have said it would have.

The Democrats promised to include a “doc fix” in ObamaCare to prevent doctors’ payments under Medicare from being cut, then pulled the “doc fix” to make ObamaCare’s financial projections look better, and now — with ObamaCare already using every obvious offset — can’t come up with the funds for something that would otherwise have had wide bipartisan support.

Nearly half of the primary-care physicians responding to a recent survey by The Medicus Firm, a national physician recruitment firm, said that they would want to leave medicine if the health-care overhaul is implemented.

Despite President Obama’s continual insistence that if you like your plan, you can keep it, his own administration’s preliminary analysis indicates that, for about half of all Americans, this might not be so. According to the analysis’s “midrange estimate,” 45 percent of large employer plans and 66 percent of small employer plans would lose their grandfathered status by the end of 2013.

Foreshadowing the new health IT provisions in ObamaCare, the funding system for electronic medical records in Obama’s $862 billion stimulus bill are frustrating medical providers, “offer[ing] a cautionary tale of what could happen when good intentions meet the reality of America’s fragmented health care system.”

As part of its long-running campaign to sell America on ObamaCare, the administration has now added a Medicare mailer, sent directly to America’s seniors, which makes some rather debatable claims about the recently passed health care overhaul.

“Even Bill Clinton’s economic advisers warned during the HillaryCare debates that imposing price controls would be difficult to implement and were likely to produce adverse effects. But those lessons appear not to have been passed on to the current administration, which seems determined to turn health insurance into an all-but government-run quasi-public utility.”