Friday, December 27, 2013

Losing Your Doctor Is The Real Plan In ObamaCare

As Reported by NBC, the Obama Administration knew as of March 2010 that approximately 93 million Americans would lose their existing health insurance plans once ObamaCare was fully implemented.  In fact, they published that very fact in the Federal Register. But, who of us actually reads the thousands of pages of the Federal Register that are published each year?

Because ObamaCare hasn't been fully implemented with the Employer, Corporate, and Small Business mandates yet to come, only about 5.9 million have actually lost their insurance and have been forced to seek coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges.  Of those 5.9 million who have navigated the website and found a plan, the most recurring comment that you hear is that they lost their doctor or doctors or even their hospital or hospitals.  This is intentional.

Actually, the architects of ObamaCare are less interested in whether or not you lose your doctor and more interested in your doctor losing you.  In their scheme of things, if enough doctors lose their patients, they will be forced to change their operational business models to treat more patients at a lower cost or, they will be forced out of business for lack of not having enough patients to cover their operating expenses.  Medical specialists, for the same reason, could also be forced back into being general practitioners.

The push here is not quality of care.  It's all about lowering costs by instituting "cattle-car" health care for Americans.  In essence, the kind of care that people are buying into in these ObamaCare exchanges is literally a form of Medicaid in the private sector, and, like Medicaid, probably only about 56% of the doctors in the U.S. will take patients in the Exchange.  But, more importantly, your life could be at risk.  The University of Virginia reviewed nearly 900,000 surgical records of Medicaid patients and compared the results with both insured and uninsured patients.  They found Medicaid patients were nearly twice as likely to die either during surgery or in recovery than people with insurance.  Their stay in the hospital, due to complications, was typically 42% longer and the overall costs were 26% higher than that of insured patients.

Lastly, in trying to sidestep the lie that "if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance", Obama is now saying that people were losing their insurance because those plans were "substandard".   Well, I would rather keep my substandard insurance plan and receive quality healthcare than have Mr. Obama's more expansive but more expensive health plans that few doctors and hospitals will accept.



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