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You can keep your doctor* (*unless doctor and staff laid off due to Obamacare)

You can keep your doctor* (*unless doctor and staff laid off due to Obamacare)

President Asterisk strikes again

You can keep your doctor, period.*

—————–

*Layoffs coming to Cleveland Clinic in plan to reduce budget by $330 million:

The Cleveland Clinic has told workers they will be laying off an unspecified number of employees as part of an overall, sweeping cost-reduction plan….

[Clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil] said early retirement would be offered to 3,000 eligible employees. Most vacant jobs are not being filled.

She attributed most of the budget reductions to looming changes accompanying the start of the Affordable Health Care Act.

Sheil said the Clinic had not made overall layoffs in the past 11 years….

She added that any layoffs would be across the board, including doctors.

The Clinic issued the following statement:

“To prepare for healthcare reform, Cleveland Clinic is transforming the way care is delivered to patients. Over the past several years, we have had an ongoing focus on driving efficiencies, lowering costs, reducing duplication in services and enhancing quality to make healthcare affordable to patients.

Although we have made progress, we need to further reduce costs to the organization by $330 million in 2014….”

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Comments

Thank you AMA! Thank you Unions! Thank you Chamber of Commerce! Thank you, thank you, thank you, everyone who supported Obamacare (aka Obamicide).

To anyone actively involved in the acute care industry these imminent cuts are a well known secret.

Everyone involved knows that they will be followed with admonitions to ‘do more with less.’

Only there is no common standards, understanding, or generally accepted practices of precisely how to do this.

It’s gonna be ugly.

Gee, who would have thunk it?

As a physician I am seeing a decent cut to my reimbursement due to this travesty. But my student loans remain in the 6 digits. My malpractice insurance remains in the mid 5 digits. But as we know, it is not really “malpractice” insurance, it is bad outcome insurance as the lawyer sue for any bad outcome.

This will not end well.

    Physician here as well.

    I said from the beginning that costs would be cut NOT by “bending the cost curve down,” but by rendering less care… for better, or for worse.

    So the game is to “encourage” (read: “force”) doctors to order fewer tests, but who bears the liability for the inevitable misses? You know… the bad-outcome “zebras” you’re sure to encounter. The statistical assumptions the manager’s “care pathway” was based upon don’t account for those… but the trial lawyers make their living on statistical outliers.

    In short, they’re going to balance their budget, yet again, by cost-shifting… but this time, they’re going to shift that cost onto your med-mal premiums… or they’ll decline to recredential you if you’re “too expensive” (eg. order too many tests)

I’ve heard a staff member at another hospital in the group my hospital just joined talking about how the medical staff, ie doctors, are being held to efficiency standards, and have to see a certain number of patients a day, or else…. So if your problem is complex, you are going to be SOL pretty soon, because your doctor will no longer have the time to talk to you and figure out what the heck is going on. So, if you’re one of the lucky ‘zebra’ patients, try to make other arrangements now. Or just get used to feeling sick all the time, being treated as an annnoyance by your medical provider because you make his/her stats look bad, and probably dying sooner than you would have without the wonderful benefits brought to you by ZeroCare. I’m working hard right now to get my zebra indentified, but I think I’m going to be seriously out of pocket before this is all over, and I have insurance. Sort of. It’s only taking four months to get into the specialist. I can hardly wait to see what happens to the availability of said specialists in a few years.

As I have said elsewhere, I spent most of 2009 warning family and acquaintances of what was going to happen if this thing went through, only to have them all tell me that I was over-reacting and nothing I was worried about would ever happen. Right now there’s a lot of Schadenfreude on my part, but it’s a lot heavier on the Schaden than I’d like, and way too light on the Freude.

There should be layoffs in Congress instead.

PersonFromPorlock | September 18, 2013 at 4:59 pm

Back in the 1960s the Air Force got saddled with something called “Project 100,000” as part of LBJ’s Great Society. The idea was to accept applicants who didn’t come up to USAF’s usual enlistment standards and train them up to being useful. There was great Pentagon interest in the program and it was a howling success for several years until it was abruptly canceled as a disaster.

I suspect the ACA will follow a similar trajectory.

    LibraryGryffon in reply to PersonFromPorlock. | September 18, 2013 at 5:11 pm

    Sounds about right. Except that the health care system won’t be able to recover the way the Air Force could. And that is probably why they are doing this. Their ultimate goal, stated out loud by many, including Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, is to get us over to a single-payer government run system. And the only way to do that is to totally break the current one so that the unwashed masses demand something, anything, be done.

    The PPACA is complete #FAIL, and it it is #intentionalFAIL.

I’m in a weird place, the company I work for has awful health insurance. My husband’s company informed us that if I had other “options” for health care I need to use them or pay fines. Now I have to work less than thirty hours so I do not qualify, swell. We screwed either way, thanks. Hope I can keep my job.

    Well, really, why should it be your husband’s boss’s responsibility to pay for all of his employees’ entire family’s healthcare needs?

    Do you provide any value to your husband’s employer? If not, why should your husband’s boss be on the hook for your healthcare costs?

    As an employer, I would like the right to hire an employee, and to compensate that employee for the work he or she does for me.

    I don’t see where it’s MY responsibility to pay for all the medical expenses for his or her entire family, unless THEY are working for me as well. But if you don’t work for me, under what authority do you claim that I owe you anything?

Hope and Change in ACTION!

(*Hoax and chains?)

Vanderbilt Medical Center is laying off over 1,000 employees in order to squeeze by during this turbulent time. This is the second article about their layoffs.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20130918/BUSINESS05/309180127/Vanderbilt-University-Medical-Center-cutting-several-hundred-more-jobs

Government employees/agents are being paid premium hourly and/or commission rates for each enrolled member. They are now the bankers who put people in homes with government backed loans. Selling a loan to a group of people who could not afford the mortgage + taxes + insurance will be the same unaffordable dilemma as paying out of pocket deductible medical expenses while still paying a monthly premium. It’s a simple matter of monthly cash flow. Sound familiar? Who picked up the tab on the mortgage fiasco and what did it do to our economy? How much farther down the rabbit hole will we go trying to clean up this enacted piece of garbage?

When enrollees use the services, but fail to pay premiums, who pays the underwriters for those services after they have reimbursed the provider? Or do the providers have to just eat the loss? If policy is canceled, how will those uncollected funds be collected ? How many of the enrollees will even care if there is an a assessed penalty when they do not currently pay taxes. How many more credits will be approved to wash the debt owed? A paper shuffle of deception. Explains Obamas need for a larger debt limit. Government = Tax Payer.

American Medical Delivery System:

How many hospitals will participate after they stop receiving reimbursements?
How many doctors will want to be a part of this?
How much will people have to double down on medical expenses in order to afford the mandatory enrollment and/or penalty and still be placed in a position to pay for private care with these service providers who no longer participate?
What will this do to the delivery of healthcare to seniors in the Medicare program as they are the same users of the same hospitals and doctors who will no longer exist to participate?

Defund Now..60 % of America will take Obama to task for idle threats of shutting down America if he chooses to fund Obamacare and opts for defunding Medicare, Social Security, Military etc. to have a working budget and increasing a debt limit to do it. Americans still have recent history of his idle threats leading up to the sequester he signed on to last year and his inability to read the writing on the wall 2 weeks ago over Syria when Americans told him “No Military Intervention”. A prelude to the next 2 budget years and lame duck interlude to 2016. The angst against Obamacare is bi-partisan with the voters, only those who financially earn their living by it, are for it.

I thought we covered this..extensively…like 2 years ago-

* and unless your company drops your plan to dump all employees on Obamacare exchanges, like Walgreens just did to 160,000 people.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/18/news/economy/walgreens-health/index.html

I hate to bring this up but with all the changes being made to corporation healthcare and changes being made to working hours etc Obamacare is not going to be reversible. Once all of these things take place the entities involved cannot be made to go back to the old way. I personally do not have an issue with individuals buying their own health insurance just we do with auto insurance but some of these changes are draconian.

    Do you realize that you just equated a hunk of steel with your very being?

      And why do you believe that the person who hires you to do a job for them should be responsible for “your very being”, rather than your good self?

      Sorry, but I’m a big believer in the idea that individuals, rather than their bosses, should be responsible for insuring themselves for their healthcare needs.

      I think that decoupling health insurance from employee benefit packages is actually A Good Thing.

      Your boss isn’t responsible for buying your food or painting your house or fixing your car when it’s broken; why do you think he or she should be responsible for paying for the routine health care costs for you, your spouse, and all of your children up to the age of 26?

$330M / 3000 employees = $110K per employee. $330M out of the budget next year? Good luck with that!

Why is it just The Cleveland Clinic that is coming out with this? I can still remember reading so many articles about how The Cleveland Clinic provided state of the art (super duper advanced, magical) medical care while doing it at below market costs for all other facilities by using their own proprietary wisdom and magic wand; all of those article must have been BS…

More worrisome, insurance companies in California are drastically cutting their preferred provider pools, keeping only the lowest bidders.

I’ll say it again-

Obamacare will collapse far faster than the scribes intended it to.

Typical for leftists…always in a hurry… never the long view like the islamists.

Cleveland Clinic CEO Shares His Incredible Vision For The Future Of Healthcare
DEC. 5, 2012, 10:54 AM

“You’ve seen by the recent shout-outs we got in the Presidential debates that we’re being looked at a model of how to go forward,” Dr. Cosgrove said, “And I really think our model is our secret sauce.”

My ass! 😉

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/business-innovation-in-healthcare-2012-12#ixzz2fIAZpSgL

They wanted single payer (government), but knew they couldn’t get there in one jump, so now we are seeing what happens when morons attempt to cross a canyon in two jumps.

the proggie meme on this will be that it’s the evil, profit mongering corporation’s fault.

Buy your own health insurance, people. Just like you buy your own home & contents and car insurance.

The only — ONLY — good thing I see coming from Obamacare, is the decoupling of health insurance from employment.

I can’t think of a more demeaning and paternalistic system than saying that individuals aren’t capable of looking after their own health insurance needs, that they must be dependent on the person who hires them to stock shelves or type memos or build widgets to provide for the healthcare needs of them, their spouses and all of their children up to the age of 26.

    jeannebodine in reply to Amy in FL. | September 19, 2013 at 9:54 pm

    In theory, that’s a wonderful idea and on the surface, it may appear that Obamacare accomplishes this.

    In reality, an individual could always purchase their own policy and decline their employer’s benefit. In the past, however, the market for individual policies was less costly & more consumer-friendly. And contrary to Democrat propaganda, almost all states required that the large health carriers – usually the Blues – write a certain percentage of pre-existing condition policies, although they weren’t cheap.

    Now, any individual policy must meet government requirements and cover soup to nuts, so the nirvana of of personal choice with an individual policy is a complete myth. Additionally, the cost for an individual policy is prohibitive (& predicted to skyrocket next year) depending where you live (I pay $698/mo for an HMO in PA), the options for policies available are severely limited (an HMO was the only policy available for purchase other than a super deluxe policies that began at $1900 a month) as were the carriers (only 2 carriers were willing to quote in the Philadelphia metropolitan area).

    Finally, I don’t think all the employees who’ve had their employers drop their health coverage & dump them into exchanges would think it’s great that Obamacare finally de-couples employment from healthcare.

Because Obama knows he must destroy healthcare in order to save it.

The best idea in providing healthcare coverage for the 5% of Americans who didn’t have it, is to obliterate the system for the 85% of Americans who liked it, and in the process, create a new millions of previously insured citizens, who now need to forego it for the cost. Notwithstanding the millions who have lost their jobs, he millions of jobs that will not be created, and the millions of people who are being reduced to part-time -all specifically because of Obamacare.

Liberals: the wold experts of unintended consequences.