The health care system in this country has gone down hill for years, starting with the horrific HMO type insurance. The doctor gets paid not to see you, not to send you to a specialist, and not to send you for tests. That is the truth, read it and weep.
Maybe. And maybe a liberal NY newpaper might have an ulterior motive to help gin up a health-care "crisis" that needs "someone" to "solve".
Sure, some HMO's are horrific. Others are quite good. We all have different health care needs. What is truly horrific is that our choices are often limited to what our employers or the gov't provide.
Too bad we can't all choose the type of insurance that suits us best.
I'm glad to say I live in a parish in South Louisiana with ZERO HMO capitated plans that do exactly as you say; pay doctors to NOT treat patients.
Many of my patients have my home phone number and emails, and I have rarely had that abused by any of them.
Of course, I live in a small town. They'd find me anyway. ;)
Not all your comments are accurate.
"The health care system in this country has gone down hill for years, starting with the horrific HMO type insurance."
Yes, this is true. Ever since the introduction of Medicare in the 1960s, the government has mismanaged the program. Many HMOs, especially community based HMOs, are in effect hired contractors to the government to manage doctors and their Medicare coding. HMOs are 'middlemen' in the business that take revenues off the top of doctors for themselves and at the same time perform contractual adjustments in negotiating reimbursement rates from the government. They save the government money and make themselves rich. Doctors and their staff get screwed.
Because of poor reimbursement rates, clinic budgets are stressed. RNs are replaced with MAs who hold a six month degree. Experienced docs are replaced by young docs who are glad to be making something better than resident pay that they had for the last 4-6 years and they have monster medical school loans to be repaid.
HMOs tell the docs to see more patients. Every year more patients must be seen to offset cuts in reimbursement rates and to support HMO administrative staff. More patients each day translates to less time for each patient.
Lots of docs are fed up, especially the experienced ones. They are going back to private practice and some are attempting to charge fee for services or negotiate their own plans with patients. Each step of the way they are impeded by government regulation and legalities. HMOs try to stop docs from going to private practice by blocking hospital priviledges or acting as credentialing certifiers. They know that docs going to private practice means less revenue for them, and less acceptance of medicare and medicaid patients because of poor and declining reimbursement rates. There are many procedures that are so poorly reimbursed that the docs lose money by seeing these patients.
"The doctor gets paid not to see you, not to send you to a specialist, and not to send you for tests."
Not exactly. For standard insurance plans or fee paying patients, docs obviously do get paid to see the patient. For Medicare and Medicaid, docs and their staffs are often not paid or are very poorly paid so they try to close their practice to new Medicare ot Medicaid patients.
However, for an existing patient in a doc's practice, they must by law see the patient, whether reimbursed or not. And they must by law refer a patient to a specialist when there is even a slight possibility of missed or delayed diagnosis or treatment. To not do these things increases the risk of malpractice liability exposure.
So docs do not get paid to NOT see a patient. They just refuse new patients to stop the cash bleed from patients that have no insurance or poorly reimbursed insurance. Most docs do accept some charity cases, about 10% as an unwritten rule. But they don't advertise it because they would be bankrupt in no time with so many patients expecting free healthcare.