From a Richmond Times-Dispatch article about a recent bipartisan conversation about health care:
“Mary Evans had a diffe rent perspective. The Richmond resident is a patient-services counselor in a local emergency room, where she helps patients who mostly rely on the federal Medicaid program for the poor.”
“Evans said she sees more people coming to the emergency room with nonemergency concerns because they can’t get timely appointments with doctors who see Medicaid patients.”
“‘If the government can’t fix Medicaid . . . why should we turn this over to them?’ she asked, referring to a health-care overhaul.”
EXACTLY RIGHT! As a lawyer who has dealt with hundreds of clients who are poor and on Medicaid, I can tell you that the system is broke. Politicians–who know nothing about how the free market works–say that they want to lower the cost of healthcare, so what do they do? They cut the price that Medicaid will pay for certain medical procedures. If the physicians charge $100 for a visit or a particular treatment, for instance, then Medicaid will pay them only $20. And when the politician wants to lower the cost of services, they reduce even that amount, and say, OK, now Medicaid will only pay $17 for that same treatment. Sounds great in theory, hero politician reigns in the cost of health care! Ta da! Politician gets re-elected and trots off on his white horse to “fix” some other problem.
But in reality what happens is that physicians find that they can’t afford to treat patients who are insured by Medicaid. You can opt out, but if you opt in, a physician can’t charge a Medicaid patient more than what Medicaid reimburses. So many physicians opt out. Then there is an artificial shortage of physicians who will treat Medicaid patients.
Medicaid patients are poor, but not stupid, so as a result of them not being able to find regular doctors to treat them, they go to where they know that they can’t be denied service: they go to hospital emergency rooms. For colds, for sore throats, for hang-nails, for constipation, for every little thing that the rest of us would go to a Patient First, a “Doc in Box” or our primary care physician. Thus, they clog up the E.R.s around the nation seeking care for problems that aren’t really true emergencies, and make it harder for true emergencies to get help.
A similar problem is caused by the fact that since the hospitals and doctors only get reimbursed by Medicaid a fraction of what the actual cost of the goods or services are. The same goes with Medicare, which is the government program for those over sixty-five. As a result of the government only paying a small percentage of what the actual cost of the goods or services are worth, the doctors and hospitals pass on the rest of the cost of those goods and services to us who pay full price and/or have private insurance.
A large percentage of our current ”health care crisis” is directly caused by the U.S. Government! The Government’s programs, also including SCHIP and the V.A. Hospital Administration, provide sub-standard care at such low prices that the true cost of providing such procedures are passed off on the rest of us, thereby making our own costs for such procedures or costs for private insurance, to skyrocket. As a result of skyrocketing costs, caused in large part by the Government programs, more and more people can’t afford insurance. And so dishonest or naive politicians swoop in, claiming to have the fix for the problem that they in large part created in the first place. And dupes such as those idiots at We Will RockDem, swallow the Democratic party line hook, line and sinker.
“Government isn’t the solution to the problem, government is the problem.” Ronald Reagan.
