Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal posted an article by Dan Henninger entitled, “ObamaCare‘s Lost Tribe: Doctors.” The article quotes the promise President Obama made to the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in 2009. The President stated, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.”
Well, did anyone ask the doctors about this? Somehow lost in the discussions of the processing of healthcare claims, the demand that everyone must have health insurance, and the institutional representatives of hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies, we have forgotten what healthcare actual boils down to–a relationship between a doctor and a patient.
The article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us:
A Wall Street Journal story the day after the Supreme Court ruling examined in detail its impact across the “health sector.” The words “doctor,” “physician” and “nurse” appeared nowhere in this report. The piece, however, did cite the view of one CEO who runs a chain of hospitals, explaining how they’d deal with the law’s expected $155 billion in compensation cuts. “We will make it up in volume,” he said.
Volume? Would that be another word for human beings? It is now. At Obama Memorial, docs won’t be treating patients. They’ll be processing “volume.” And then, with what time and energy remains in the day, they’ll be inputting medical data to comply with the law’s new Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
This may be good for the government, but it is not good for the patient. The article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal goes on to explain how the emphasis in Obamacare on volume will impact medical care in America. Healthcare needs to be reformed, but Obamacare is not the answer.