“Why hasn’t Obama just forced these doctors to accept Obamacare patients or threaten to take away their medical licenses?”
Medical licenses are issued by states, so it wouldn’t prevent doctors from practicing on a cash only basis or accepting regular commercial patients. There are some commie states such as MA, CA, NY MD etc that could take a hard line against doctors, but that would only hasten the exit of even more physicians to the liberty minded states. The Feds, via CMS (Medicare) could force doctors to sign up for and accept 0-care patients or forfeit Medicare. However, such a move could result in doctors dropping Medicare as well. I suppose the one thing that the Feds could do would be to force states to pass laws forcing doctors to take the 0-care patients (and Medicare, Medicaid for that matter), but I’d imagine that there would be quite a stir with that one because 0bama would have to do an EO or 0bama would have HHS just create the rule. Even SCOTUS has ruled that the Feds cannot force states to set up exchanges with the threat of withdrawing Medicaid money, and that was part of the 0-care law.
Even if doctors agreed to take 0-care patients, it is unclear how much elective care they would actually receive. All hospital organizations recognize that after 30 days, an 0-care patient can stopping their premiums, but still be considered covered by the insurance company. Most of these bronze plans have high deductibles because that’s all lower middle income people can afford. This makes them big credit risks, and most hospitals and clinics will demand payment up front at least to cover expenses with a small margin.
That leaves the ER to take up the slack when the poorer 0-care patients really need treatment. In other instances, the 0-care patients will need to pay cash at non accepting providers.
Good explanation.