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Posted on 09/22/2008 2:35:09 AM PDT by Soliton
The wait to see primary care doctors in Massachusetts has grown to as long as 100 days, while the number of practices accepting new patients has dipped in the past four years, with care the scarcest in some rural areas.
Now, as the state's health insurance mandate threatens to make a chronic doctor shortage worse, the Legislature has approved an unprecedented set of financial incentives for young physicians, and other programs to attract primary care doctors. But healthcare leaders fear the new measures will take several years to ease the shortage.
Senate President Therese Murray, who championed the legislation, said that many of the roughly 439,000 people who obtained health coverage under the 2006 insurance law are struggling to find a doctor. "You can take a look at the whole state and you are not going to find a primary care physician anytime soon," she said in an inter view. "It became apparent very quickly that we needed to do something."
Access to internists and family practitioners is especially difficult in the western counties and on Cape Cod, doctors said, but Boston, too, is feeling the squeeze. Doctors and patient advocates report growing stress for patients trying to get care, and for physicians trying to squeeze them in:
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
They will simply say there's not enough money and clamor for more. Just like the schools. Eleven thousand dollars a year per child is simply not enough money.
Massachusetts is expecting 3.5 billion from the Feds to fund Romneycare. A lot of this money will go to Democrat consultants, hacks, children and relatives of Democrats in the bureaucracy. Some will go to union workers, concrete contractors and if any is left, Doctors and patients.
Suckers. Anyways, as this blows up it will continue to metastasize on Mitt's mile wide, paper thin reputation.
It would not of happened at all, without Mitt PUSHING for it.
This was not forced on Mitt. He did the forcing. He was the critical, positive agent.
I totally agree with you but these hardcore lifers in Congress won’t vote on term limits. I don’t think the issue has been brought up in decades, if ever. They are there for life and for making as much coin as they can from special interests.
The only way we the people can fix it is by voting out the old dead wood and replacing them but it would take decades to do so.
The average wait time to see a primary care physician in Mass. in 2004 was 47 days. Today, the average wait time is 50 days even with thousands of new enrollees.
The state legislture is addressing the chronic shortgage of primary care physicians (especially in the rural areas) with an agressive recruiting campaign.
So what is it exactly you're complaining about again?
I’m not arguing with who proposed what but the fact the press (liberals) will attack something they have been pushing for forever.
It would be akin for them to throwing the baby out with the bath water.
1. Mitt. He's a political psycho.
2. He did do, tried to fluff up the credit, and has now, left Mass to deal with yet another leftist, hack, growing problem, his Romneycare. I live in Mass, so it's my problem. In as much as Mass is getting in the neighborhood of 3.5 billion, per year, from taxpayers all over the country, taxpayers with less income, poorer, that are more prudent and conservative, it is your problem too.
3. As the system decays, the problems will show up at the margins. Like a small mole on skin, it will grow. Rural patients, taxes already, will have to go, or not, to more urban areas.
4. Oh, yes, in the future, someday, not today, or tomorrow, but someday, the increasing problems will get better. Honest. Trust us. Not that you would now, but George Owell called that the “No jam today, but jam tomorrow’ lying of leftist everywhere.
I live 20 miles south of Boston. My primary care physician is part of a large family practice group. If you need to see one of the Drs. you get an appointment that same day. The only thing you have a long wait for is a routine physical. With my particular doctor you are never rushed out the door. He takes as long as he needs to and answers all questions clearly in layman’s terms.
The most vivid reason that Sarah Palin is the vice presidential nominee!
(Romney had it wrong.)
Predatory practices by insurance companies screwed up the medial industry as they sucked the profits and life out of it. Government steps in to mandate things, so doctors no longer find they can make a living and they leave. The next step is HillaryCare, which wanted the government to decide who gets to even go to medical school and then select who goes. Her plan was the communist Soviet Union plan whereby the government tells people what they will do for a living and what they cannot do for a living.
Government is the problem as they demanded healthcare plans by employers, which lead to high prices and low services.
Amen! Sister Salvation! :)
Nope, he caved.
Someone committed to the survival of the states and the nation would not permit this crap to be discussed, much less sign off on it.
Neither is the story from Oregon about the state sending out letters denying treatment to certain cancer patients, but offering to pay for about $100 worth of barbituates if they would care to kill themselves. The story was in the latest edition of the National Right to Life News.
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