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Not only can’t you keep your doctor, you may not even have a doctor

Not only can’t you keep your doctor, you may not even have a doctor

Obamacare-exchange insurance is essentially Medicaid lite – insurance but few doctors who will see you.

We’ve covered this issue before – No, you can’t keep your doctor, in fact, you may not even have a doctor because the only way for Obamacare exchanges to keep prices down for the expansive coverage required by law is to severely restrict your access to medical providers.

Oh, you’ll have “insurance,” just few doctors in the network and those who are will be overwhelmed.  Welcome to waiting times, at best.

From that known right-wing fearmonger, The New York Times, Lower Health Insurance Premiums to Come at Cost of Fewer Choices:

NY Times Obamacare Exhange Lower Cost

Federal officials often say that health insurance will cost consumers less than expected under President Obama’s health care law. But they rarely mention one big reason: many insurers are significantly limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals available to consumers.

From California to Illinois to New Hampshire, and in many states in between, insurers are driving down premiums by restricting the number of providers who will treat patients in their new health plans.

When insurance marketplaces open on Oct. 1, most of those shopping for coverage will be low- and moderate-income people for whom price is paramount. To hold down costs, insurers say, they have created smaller networks of doctors and hospitals than are typically found in commercial insurance. And those health care providers will, in many cases, be paid less than what they have been receiving from commercial insurers.

Some consumer advocates and health care providers are increasingly concerned. Decades of experience with Medicaid, the program for low-income people, show that having an insurance card does not guarantee access to specialists or other providers.

There’s a term for this: Bait and switch.  You think you’re getting a Cadillac plan, but you’ve just paid cash for a clunker.

Related: You can keep your doctor* (*unless doctor and staff laid off due to Obamacare) and Obamacare destroying the private insurance market (according to plan).

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Comments

Hmmmm. Since the pool of doctors and hospitals will be severely limited, that seems like a blessing in disguise.

What I mean is that, since Obamacare will limit itself to few doctors and clinics, that leaves LOTS of other doctors and hospitals who can create a free enterprise solution. This is our chance to start a system on OUR terms and not the government’s.

It can work. And when it does, Obamacare will die on the vine.

    Radegunda in reply to NavyMustang. | September 23, 2013 at 11:48 am

    Problem is, LOTS of doctors are retiring early and lots of young people are deciding not to go into medicine after all. The ACA has outlawed any new doctor-owned hospitals, and the govt. can clamp down on other free-market solutions with the huge discretion given to the HHS secretary, not to mention the admin.’s inclination to say the law is whatever they went it to be at the moment.

    Within 5 years your SmartPhone will be able to run a full diagnostic panel – perform and evaluate an EKG and diagnose all manner of ills.

    Look for Doc in the BoX places that will prescribe meds based on a download from your SmartPhone.

Not A Member of Any Organized Political | September 23, 2013 at 11:10 am

Those Death Panels are gonna have to work triple overtime!

Snark Snark!

Don’t expect your employers to help with health care as more of them go out of business and the remaining ones are being threatened by ObamaDontCare.

Retailer Target just announced a couple of weeks back that their sales are DOWN 18% now. Then this appears.

“Target to Hire 18,000 Fewer Seasonal Workers This Holiday Season; Expect Other Retailers to Do the Same”

Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/09/target-to-hire-18000-fewer-seasonal.html#c21mKz9MrgAL8iqg.99

A race to see what happens first: getting to see a doctor OR dying. Pretty soon, there will be betting exchanges and the WH will skim its cut of each bet off the top.

Nothing like video of dead bodies in waiting rooms to spice up those 2014/2016 campaign ads, eh Dems?

You aren’t going to see a doctor, you will get a NP or PA.

    Bingo. Only those with the cash or the connections are going to be allowed to see a real doctor. All the commoners get are a rotating assortment of “mid-level physician extenders”.

Phillep Harding | September 23, 2013 at 11:44 am

Right now, immigrants, legal and otherwise, cannot practice medicine without jumping through a lot of hoops, going back to school, etc.

Hmmm.

What was that about illegal aliens being allowed to practice law?

Are we going to see something like this in medicine? Along with Cuban style Doctors (who lack the breadth of knowledge need to spot when symptoms “over here” means a serious problem “over there”.)

Through the whole debate, the Dem-leftists have equated “health care” with “coverage” on a piece of paper. They’ve given essentially no thought to whether there will be the resources or incentives to provide the actual treatment.

Those are the same people who think they can simply command employers to raise wages or command them to restructure their businesses in various ways, and it can be done without any harm to the business. They imagine that the resources will magically show up as long as good people make the laws.

Dem-leftists live in an abstract world where their will to make everything perfectly just is sufficient, and the only thing standing in the way is greedy Republicans who don’t want to make the world perfectly just.

Well first hand experience: my son has medicaid I was referred to a ophthalmologist from my son’s primary care provider. This particular ophthalmologist is funded by a large state university in the Tampa area and named after the institution. When I first called, the gatekeeper discouraged the appointment suggesting that I see an optometrist. I called my son’s Dr. and she said no make an appt. with the ophthalmologist due inherited family eye issues. So I called back again, I relay what my son’s primary said, she put’s me on hold for some time and comes back on to relay that the next appointment available is in January of next year. Fortunately it is not an emergency but wanted it taken care of as soon as possible as the school year is already in session. So even if the Dr. is government funded it certainly seems that they are discouraged from taking medicaid. Fortunately for us in 30 days or less we will have an private insurance plan that covers my son.

I am so ticked off that I feel like having someone else call and see if they actually have no available appt. until next year.
I find it amazing and highly frustrating the GOP sits on there hands and won’t fight Obamacare(medicaid lite)! What a travesty they are truly inept, I have never believed in 3rd Parties but hey going 3rd party you just need 34% to win.

    Phillep Harding in reply to lions. | September 23, 2013 at 12:43 pm

    You might talk to the primary care Dr. If there is an actual issue, he will raise all sorts of cain with the opthamologist.

    (A primary care physician I know sent someone to a surgeon for an appendectomy. The surgeon says “Oh, you just need to lose weight.” Wow. Fireworks? It was appendicitis.)

    Bones in reply to lions. | September 23, 2013 at 2:25 pm

    That’s how it goes with Medicaid. Physicians make little, if any money from Medicaid, but some take it anyway because they feel an obligation to the poor. However, they limit their appointment slots for Medicaid… because if they took too high a percentage of Medicaid, they could find themselves in the red. Literally.

    Without the bulk of their appointment slots going to something that actually does provide enough profit to pay the bills, the staff, the rent, the insurance… AND take home a paycheck for the MD (who gets paid last, BTW…), they’d have to close their practice.

    That’s just the way it is.

    rodaka in reply to lions. | September 24, 2013 at 3:09 am

    I don’t have experience with Medicaid in the US, but incredibly long wait times and difficulty seeing a specialist is the norm for universally insured Swedes.

I’m not real smart, so let me see if I get this.

I pay a provider a large sum of money, so they can turn around and tell me they can’t pay any of that money to a doctor to help me, because they might go broke!?

    Henry Hawkins in reply to rinardman. | September 23, 2013 at 12:58 pm

    Bear in mind this is by a system that considers a billion dollars to be a small amount of money.

    Bruce Hayden in reply to rinardman. | September 23, 2013 at 7:59 pm

    Keep in mind a couple of things (ignored by the left). First, if they don’t make money, they are out of business. That means that revenues have to equal or exceed expenses. Only the federal government can ignore this reality, at least for awhile, by essentially printing money. Moreover, ObamaCare mandates a losing economic model. No pre-existing conditions means that people need not sign up until they need serious healthcare, and the penalties are low enough, and the enforcement is weak enough, to let this happen. So, instead of spreading costs over the sick and the well, they will mostly be spread over just the sick, or those too honest to dodge getting coverage. Compounding this are all sorts of required coverages, including birth control and covering dead beat 20-something’s.

    As Gov Palin pointed out years ago, the only way to make any of this work for very long are Death Panels, which will be used to justify turning down treatments, and controlling the amount of health care paid for.

It boils down to this. You’ll have a piece of paper that paid a lot of money for that says you are covered, but good luck actually getting the care you may need.

Kind of like paying a lot of money for a college degree, and then attempting to find a job in this economy.

I just got off the phone with my insurance agent regarding the policy I provide for one of my sons still in college. When it expires, I won’t be able to replace it with a comparable product — it will be “a lot more expensive”. The “good news” he joked, is that the boy can have free birth control pills.

Waiting for the revolution.

Well, my wife’s an RN, albeit disabled, and I’ve bought a lot of books on the treatment of common diseases and minor surgery and stuff. I plan to just wing it. DIY, baby. I’ll probably get close to the same outcomes, but much cheaper than with Obamacare.

Well, I guess that I should consider myself lucky as I have Medicare and the VA.

But neither of those are assured I’m sure.

How did we go from being on top of the heap in the early 1960’s to knocking on the door of third world status now?

I have my suspicions but I had better keep my opinions to myself if I know what’s good for me…

In other words, there is no health insurance.

Good grief you guys. Here’s another “quirky” little “glitch” in Obamacare:

Glitch in #Obamacare may leave 500,000 kids uninsured.

To borrow Instapundit’s trope, “They told me that if I voted for Romney, half a million kids would lose their healthcare coverage…”