"“We are at a crisis,' Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program said. 'Health care providers, particularly those in primary care, are finding it very difficult to sustain an independent practice. We are seeing greater and greater corporatization of our health care. Practices are being taken over by these large corporations. You have absolutely no voice when it comes to dealing with the insurance company. They tell you what your reimbursements will be. They make it incredibly difficult and complex to get reimbursed. The rules are arbitrary and change frequently.'”
"Ms. Flowers was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizations such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room."
Link: http://www.truth-out.org/power-and-tiny-acts-rebellion65351
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4 comments:
'you have no choice when it comes to reimbursements' is a perfect description of the position the physician finds himself in when treating a patient and the government is the payor.
Advocates of a single payer system, like the group your author is speaking for, conveniently overlook this.
Why do you think so many doctors won't take on additional Medicare patients? It's because the government is forcing them to perform services and lose money in the process.
Agreed.
and the reason why Medicare won't pay enough is because the corporation keep boosting the costs of this coverage because we have a for-profit health care system, unlike most of the rest of the world. the insurance companies are, for the most part, pricing us out of health care. That isn't the gov't's fault. It's the insurance company's.
So, the 'evil profit motive' is the culprit, eh?
Do you, as a matter of principle, refuse to go to a doctor who operates his practice on a for-profit basis?
Why is it ok for a doctor to make a profit in his practice, but insurance companies are evil for doing so?
How many people are going to want to take out massive student loans and dedicate years of their life to go to medical school if the pot at the end of the rainbow is a career making just above average?
How many drug companies do you think would take big financial risks to develop new medicines and treatments if they were barred from making a profit?
What you either don't know or ignore is that, all across Europe and Scandinavia, etc., doctors and hospitals operate with profits quite well but they're more bridled so they don't have things like insurance companies raising their rates and premiums annually, year after year, strictly for the benefit of the insurance company. It doesn't happen there. That's why their system works and ours doesn't.
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