You can keep your doctor, but can he keep you?
h/t Drudge
CNN Money writes today that doctors are going broke.
Dr. J. will break it down for you really quick.
About half of all doctors are in private practice. Private practice is a small business. It is a weird business because Medicare/Medicaid/Insurance (aka. someone else) is paying the business to provide a service to the customer. Medicare and Medicaid are now paying less for the same service than they did in the past. Insurance companies are following suit. Smaller groups have greater fixed costs, and less negotiating power with insurance companies and less of an ability to birddog claims.
Increasingly burdeonsome regulations (HITECH, EMRs, ICD-10, and meaningful use) are jacking up those fixed costs.
This is why many doctors are abandoning the private practice model and joining hospital owned groups. New Atlantis Ivory Tower Medical Center has just bought two such groups in the burbs. While they will make less money, they will still have a paycheck, less headaches and be able to spend more time doing what they do best, which is take care of YOU!
The doctors who are going broke are the ones who haven’t been bought out by a hospital or are holding out as long as possible in order to maintain their freedom from ‘working for someone else.’
So for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, this is another consequence of the government picking winners and losers, and short circuiting the free market system.
Really simply, the American medical system can be saved if the providers and consumers take it back from the government in putting it back into the hands of the American citizens where it belongs.
This starts, of course, with the repealing of Obamacare, followed by strategies to reform and potentially replace medicare/medicaid, over a generation, reasonable deregulation of insurance companies to provide products its purchasers want, and removal of tax penalties against small business owners or self employed individuals with regard to purchasing health insurance.
But then again, you knew that already.
