filing the claim is mere paperwork, that they don't accept/participate means you will pay BIGTIME to be seen/operated on when the bill comes...Besides, just because the doctor “doesn’t accept insurance” only means he won’t process the claim. Unless the plan is network-only, the patients can just file it themselves, just like it always was in the old days before insurance companies got too big for their britches.
They will end up trying to strong-arm doctors into caring for Obamacare patients.
Doctors are a surly lot when anyone tries to monkey with their practice of medicine...and rightly so.
It won’t be easy to force MDs to do anything.
I predict hundreds of thousands of new doctors that can’t speak English.
filing the claim is mere paperwork, that they don't accept/participate means you will pay BIGTIME to be seen/operated on when the bill comes...In the old days, medical expenses were more deductible (you could deduct the amount over 3% of gross income -- now it will be 10%). So people would pay cash, save their bills, add them up at tax time, and that would be that.
If the feds really wanted to simplify things, people would be allowed to pay for routine medical bills with their credit/debit cards, the provider would transmit a code to the card company that this is a deductible medical expense, the card companies would summarize the total and transmit a yearly 1098-type form to the card holder and the IRS, and the individual would just deduct it. BANG, no insurance overhead for the doctor, lower costs to the individual, less paperwork all around.
People could then go back to just needing to have catastrophic hospitalization insurance.