In each of the past three months we have had to use multiple days to cover all of Obama Care’s insanity. The first post in the August series can be accessed at:
The first post in the September series can be accessed at:
The first post in the October series can be accessed at:
As a result of these previous, in-depth analyses and reviews, this month will focus more on the bad news than the analysis and research behind the bad news. We do that for two reasons:
- First, we have already laid out the reasons why Obama Care can never be successful: it never researched and understood the underlying root causes of our high health care costs in this country. Without understanding root causes, the chances of actually resolving the true issues are next to nothing.
- Second, we are currently looking at over 200 articles and analyses that prove Obama Care is a disaster. To repeat previous analyses and research would not allow us to make much of a dent into the ever growing failures. Thus, we will focus on news, not analysis, this month since the analysis discussed in preivous months; posts are unchanged.
So, let’s get started and see what evil and failure Obama Care has created in just the past four weeks or so:
1) One of the most visible disasters of Obama Care has been the website that prospective customers of Obama Care’s exchanges were supposed to be able to easily logon onto to and easily find health insurance policies that fit their needs. Most everyone in the country by now knows that the website process and experience has been an utter disaster with security breeches, website unavailability, and other problems.
How bad has the website experience been, keeping in mind that the Obama administration had three years and had spent well over a whopping $600 million to develop? According to a recent Gallup survey 63% of those uninsured Americans who have visited an Obama Care website described the experience as negative or very negative. Three years, $600 million spent and nearly two out of three people found the experience distasteful. Pathetic job of simple website development.
2) One of the major intentions of Obama Care was to get millions of uninsured Americans into health insurance policies. However, the logic of the legislation failed a basic and simple reasoning test: if millions of Americans now have health insurance they are more likely to use their health insurance options.
But if no provisions are made to increase the number of doctors to handle the millions of more potential customers, you are going to have a problem. It is a simple law of supply and demand. Increasing the demand while doing nothing to also increase the supply will result in shortage of supply and likely higher costs due to higher demand. And higher health care costs is the exact opposite of what Obama Care is supposed to do.
This fact of life was driven home by a recent Wall Street Journal article that was reviewed in the November 15, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. According to the article, the U.S. will likely be short 150,000 doctors by 2028, about 3,000 doctors per state on average. More importantly and distressingly, most of the shortage will be with primary care physicians, those doctors that people are most likely to want to see under their health insurance plans but who generally make far less money on average than medical specialists.
Which again illustrates a point we have made over the past few months: just because you have health insurance in the world of Obama Care does not mean you have adequate or any kind of health care, given what is likely a doctor shortage crisis that the writers of Obama Care were never smart enough to understand. The operation was a success (i.e., you have health insurance coverage) but the patient died (i.e. you could not get in to see a doctor).
3) Speaking of doctors shortages, consider what is going on in California. According to a recent Washington Examiner article, estimates say that a whopping 7 out of 10 California doctors will not participate in the Obama Care exchange in California because the insurance payments for services provided in exchange health care policies are too low.
Details from the article include the following:
- “It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a high rate of nonparticipation,” said Dr. Richard Thorp, president of the California Medical Association, a group that represent about 38,000 of the 100,000 or so California doctors.
- In September, less than a month before the exchanges went live, the California Obama Care exchange announced that doctor payment schedules will be linked to the state’s Medicaid rates, some of the lowest rate schedules in the country.
- For example, in other states, Medicare pays doctors $76 for return-office visits. However, in California, Medi-Cal’s reimbursement is $24, according to Dr. Theodore M. Mazer, a San Diego ear, nose and throat doctor. This is the rate, $24, that the Obama Care insurance policies will be pegged to.
- In other states, doctors receive between $500 to $700 to perform a tonsillectomy. In California, they get $160.
- As a result, vast number of doctors will not become part of the Obama Care exchange doctors’ networks or will retire out of frustration, according to doctor quotes in the article.
- Dr. Theodore M. Mazer, a San Diego ear, nose and throat doctor is quoted in the article asserting that he knows of NO ONE in his area of expertise that has signed up to be part of the Obama Care exchange in California: “I cannot find anybody in my specialty in the area that has signed a contract directly with any of these plans.” Thus, if you live in California and rely on an Obama Care health insurance policy, try to make sure that you never get an ear, nose or throat affliction because your policy may not give you access to the right type of medical specialist.
- Mazer is one of those many, older California doctors who is thinking about retiring early as a result of Obama Care: “I just turned 55, and a lot of us are kind of going, ‘Maybe there’s something else we can do in the last 10 years,’ because this is just getting too onerous to keep on going.”
- As an additional insult, many doctors quoted in the article assert that their names were listed with the Obama Care exchange policies as being affiliated with those policies when in fact they had never signed up.
Of course, these lower reimbursement rates of Obama Care policies in California are an attempt to make those policies more affordable. But the creators of Obama Care never understood basic economics, namely that reducing the price you pay for a service discourages providers of those services.
Thus, while the policies might look good and affordable up front, trying to actually use the promises in those policies will be the real challenge and danger in times of illness because the affordability of the policies dried up the servicers of those policies, i.e. it created acute doctor shortages.
4) The same flawed reasoning that is leading to limited access to the tope doctors and medical specialists is also being applied to the top hospitals and medical centers across the country, with the same results: severely reducing the hospital reimbursement levels for Obama Care insurance policies is resulting in top echelon hospitals not being part of the policies and not being accessible to those who buy those policies.
This was vividly illustrated in a recent Financial Times investigation. The Times found that Americans who are Obama Care online exchange policies will have limited access to some of the nation’s leading hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centers.
This lack of access is caused by the drive by Obama Care insurers to limit costs. As examples, the Times report found that the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California will not provide access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer hospitals, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country.
The Times article pointed out two very real downsides of what Obama Care is doing to hospital access:
- Frustrated consumers could then begin to realize what is not always evident when buying a product as complicated as healthcare insurance: that their new plans do not cover many facilities or doctors “in network.” In other words, the facilities and doctors are not among the list of approved providers in a certain plan.
- Under some US health insurance plans, consumers can elect to visit medical facilities that are “out of network,” but they would probably incur high out of pocket costs and may need referrals to prove that such care is medically necessary
- Thus, if someone has to pay additional money to see the right type of doctor or hospital, doesn’t that negate the whole principle of lowering health care insurance and medical costs? Most people cannot preordain what kind of sickness or disease they get, opening themselves up to much higher medical costs if the limited number of doctors or hospitals they are allowed to see does not handle their kind of malady.
As we have said many times before, Obama Care is a bad approach to providing health care insurance to millions of Americans. It is an even worse way to provide actual health care to millions of Americans. Under this legislation, health care insurance does not guarantee you access to quality health care or any health care at all, given the dire doctor shortage. More bad news tomorrow… and the next day, and the next day….
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