Obamacare closing more and more private practices....Physicians are leaving small communities

Many, many, many physicians have had to close their private practices, and forced to join hospital owned offices. Either that or find a job not in medicine! Gee…thanks Obamacare….What ever happened to “you can keep your Doctor”? He (Obama) knew that it was a load of crap….and so did all the rest of us. The sooner Obamacare is scrapped the better….just another closed-end, expensive, waste of time and money government program that only Socialist covet!

Alaska Physician Shuts Down Practice, Citing Obamacare

From the Daily Caller

9:39 PM 09/21/2014

Sarah Hurtubise Reporter

After a long list of Obamacare failures in Alaska, one physician is shutting down his decades-old practice, charging that the health-care law and other federal programs are “unsustainable” for practicing doctors.

Dr. William Wennen, a plastic surgeon, is closing his Fairbanks practice after 38 years of working in the state. Dr. Wennen blames federal health insurance programs, citing Obamacare, Medicaid and Medicare, for shutting down his practice.

“It is an unsustainable system,” Dr. Wennen wrote to his customers in a letter obtained by The Daily Caller. “I am personally writing off upwards of three quarters of a million dollars annually in free/uncompensated care.”

“My reasons for closing down the office are simply economic,” Wennen wrote. “The governmental agencies that are supplying ‘medical insurance’ to the elderly, the disadvantaged, the indigent and the sick, injured, or disabled have placed an unrealistically low value of worth on physician’s services.”

Medicaid typically has the lowest physician reimbursements of any federal program. Doctors have been protesting pay cuts for services through Medicaid and Medicare. It’s increasingly difficult for customers to actually find health care providers that accept the coverage — especially in private practice, where doctors are more hard-pressed to be profitable than at big-budget hospitals. 

 “Within the last month, Fairbanks has lost three other much respected physicians for the same or similar reasons,” Dr. Wennen wrote. ”I am not the first and certainly will not be the last of the exodus of physicians from active practice because of all of this.”

Dr. Wennen is far from alone in his stark opposition to the health-care law. A recent survey from the Physicians Foundation found that 46 percent of doctors in the U.S. would give Obamacare a “D” or an “F,” the Washington Examiner reported.

For his part, Wennen hopes to continue providing medical care through other avenues, but can no longer afford to keep his practice. Other doctors nationwide have simply refused to accept coverage provided by federal agencies — even private coverage sold through Obamacare exchanges.

Physicians argue about the problems and causes of the medical system

Insurance Companies and Medical Malpractice Lawyers will always find a way to take care of politicians (and politicians will take care of them). We the paying consumer seeking medical care…we’re F%*#ed!

Doctors Debate Cause of Their Profession's Woes

By Sean Piccoli
Friday, 19 Sep 2014 21:40 PM

Writing in NewsMax

"It’s just one more of the multiple interferences between the doctor and the patient, and gets in the way of our treatments," Hubbard said of President Barack Obama's signature law. 

"I know that we need some guidance and there are things that need to be changed," said Hubbard, "but all we’re doing now is setting up a more of a bureaucracy, more of people in the middle that are going to frustrate doctors even more and more. And doctors are just going to decide, well, it’s not worth it."

Hubbard said that if he were polled he would give the ACA a "D."

Chris Lillis, an internal medicine specialist and "Doctors for America" contributor, said that the health-care overhaul deserves better. 

"My grade is a B-plus," he said, arguing that "the bureaucracy that remains between me and my patients … is the for-profit health insurance companies."

Lillis said that insurers, even after getting millions of new customers through the state and federal health-insurance exchanges established under the ACA, "are engaging in a lot of underhanded tactics to try to continue to control costs.

"Things like raising the price of generic medicines, restricting networks, forcing prior authorizations on physicians," said Lillis. "And I understand Dr. Hubbard’s concern, but he ought to train his blame on the insurance industry, not on Obamacare."

Americans do not for the most-part understand Obamacare, and what they do know....They don't like!

The takeaway here is that Americans for the most part do not understand the law, but what they do understand they (Americans) do not like. Big trouble moving forward for us all. It aint gonna be pretty!

Disapproval of ObamaCare reaches new high, poll finds

By Elise Viebeck - 09/16/13 01:15 PM EDT

A new poll finds 53 percent of people disapprove of ObamaCare and President Obama's approach to healthcare policy, a record high on both questions. 

The survey from USA Today and the Pew Research Center also found Republicans have gained a narrow but telling edge on healthcare issues generally. 

The poll revealed that 40 percent now prefer the GOP on healthcare compared to 39 percent who prefer Democrats, erasing a preference for Democrats that had stretched back more than 20 years.

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The findings come just two weeks before ObamaCare's new insurance marketplaces open for enrollment. But that process, which is crucial to healthcare reform's success, could see trouble given ongoing confusion among crucial groups. 

About one-third (34 percent) reported that they do not understand how the healthcare law will work, a figure that has only slightly improved since the law's passage.

Meanwhile, nearly four in 10 of the uninsured do not realize they will be required to buy coverage or pay a fine starting next year.

This understanding is better among the general population, where seven in 10 grasp the so-called individual mandate, but worse among young people whose participation in the new exchanges is vital to ObamaCare's success.

Some have attributed the public's weak understanding of healthcare reform to Republicans' opposition to the law.

In Congress, the GOP has voted more than 40 times to repeal, defund or dismantle ObamaCare, and states run by Republicans have often worked against the administration to undermine the law's rollout.

The House GOP is debating how best to thwart ObamaCare during the next fiscal battle to fund the government.
Conservatives want to pass a spending bill that funds every part of the government except the healthcare law, hoping the imminent threat of a shutdown will force Obama to neglect the reform.

But ObamaCare's opponents do not necessarily agree on this tact, according to the poll. A majority (51 percent to 42 percent) said officials should help the law succeed instead of working to ensure its failure.

USA Today and Pew polled 1,506 adults between Sept. 4-8. The survey's margin of error is three percent.

It's a start! Computers will replace physicians in the care of the human being! Just a start!

This is only the start. My believe is within a few short years a computer will greet the patient in the waiting room, assist them into the exam room, scan the patient (with the help of an implanted device - yeah...that's coming soon as well), ask a few short questions, then diagnose and prescribe if necessary! You heard it here first. Physicians will be directing, and in some instances assisting the doc-computer.

IBM Watson partners with Modernizing Medicine of Boca Raton

May 17, 2014|By Marcia Heroux Pounds, Sun Sentinel

Modernizing Medicine is partnering with IBM Watson — of Jeopardy! fame — to expand its electronic medical assistant.

With the help of the supercomputer, physicians will soon be able to ask a question of Watson about treatment research and get an immediate response as they're caring for a patient.

The interaction would take place via Modernizing Medicine's iPad tablet customized for specialty physicians such as dermatologists.
"The next decade forward will be the most exciting we've ever seen in computing as we begin to ask the computer questions and get direct answers," said Dan Cane, co-founder and CEO of Modernizing Medicine, based in Boca Raton.
IBM announced Friday that Modernizing Medicine was among three companies chosen for the IBM Watson Ecosystem program designed to develop a new generation of apps.
"The power of Watson is a game-changing proposition. Since we established a Watson developer ecosystem, we've seen the creativity flow from entrepreneurs around the world with business-changing ideas for the Watson technology," said Michael Rhodin, senior vice president for IBM Watson Group.
Watson may be best known for the 2011 stunt when the supercomputer was pitted against the best players on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! The computer won.
Cane said Watson represents a new era in which a computer can understand natural language while Modernizing Medicine collects data to help doctors learn from treatment outcomes.
With Watson, doctors will be able to instantly access research and information about clinical trials in hundreds of medical journals to better assess a treatment for a patient.
"Watson allows us to combine both worlds," Cane said. "It's a phenomenal collaboration."
Modernizing Medicine has built a prototype and plans to make Watson available to dermatologists that use its iPad app later this year, he said.
Cane said the company was working out a financial arrangement with IBM, which he couldn't disclose.
Modernizing Medicine, which was founded in 2010, has more than 3,300 physician practices across the country using its medical assistant systems.
The business has grown to $17.5 million in revenue in three years, employing 175 people.

In 2013, Modernizing Medicine was listed at No. 47 on Forbes' annual ranking of America's Most Promising Companies.

Pull up a chair! Obamacare is causing longer waits to see a Physician!!!

Incentive has been taken away from Physicians to work hard! Just ask Adam Smith in regards to the “Invisible Hand” that causes us to do our best. Remove incentives and fair reimbursements, and what do you get….LONGER WAITING TIMES!

Doctor Wait Times Rise As Obamacare Rolls Out

1/29/2014 @ 11:13AM

h/t FORBES 

Patients are waiting an average of 18 days to schedule an appointment for a doctor, according to a study of appointments for commonly used specialty physicians in 15 major U.S. cities.

The survey by physician staffing and consulting firm Merritt Hawkins comes as a doctor shortage looms as more patients seek medical care under the Affordable Care Act. The health law is bringing millions more Americans health benefits and therefore the ability to pay for a visit to the doctor’s office.

The longest wait to see a doctor was in Boston where the average wait was 45.5 days to schedule an appointment with a family physician, dermatologist, cardiologist, orthopedic surgeon or obstetrician/gynecologist. The survey came from a sampling late last year of nearly 1,400 medical offices across the country.

“In the next two to three years, can we keep a bad situation from getting worse?” asked Travis Singleton, senior vice president at Merritt Hawkins, a subsidiary of AMN Healthcare (AMN). ”Everything will tell you it’s going to get worse and not better.”

The increase in doctor wait times to this point isn’t completely related to the health law. The improving economy is also driving more Americans to the doctor’s office. In recent years, data has showed slow growth in visits to doctor’s office during a period of high unemployment as well as the trend for insurance companies and employers to increase co-payments and deductibles.

“Finding a physician who can see you today, or three weeks from today, can be a challenge, even in urban areas where there is a high ratio of physicians per population,” said Mark Smith, president of Merritt Hawkins.  “The demand for doctors is simply outstripping the supply.” When health care coverage is expanded and there is more access to physicians, wait times rise.

Take Boston, which has a high number of “physicians per capita,” Singleton said. “Yet they still have the longest waits for appointments.”

Massachusetts has had broad health care coverage for most of its residents for several years now and the state’s law was the model for the Affordable Care Act.

“People are accessing the system (in Massachusetts) at greater and greater levels,” Singleton added.

There is, however, good news for appointment times as health care reimbursement moves away from fee-for-service medicine to value-based care that emphasizes the use of accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes.

In ACOs and other models, doctors are handing off more responsibilities to physician assistants and nurse practitioners with the physician as more of a quarterback of sorts.

Medicare and most private insurers like those operated by Aetna  (AET), Cigna  (CI), Humana  (HUM),UnitedHealth Group UnitedHealth Group (UNH) and most Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans are linking with ACOs, which push high quality, less expensive care rather than today’s payment system that often leads to excessive care by paying for each treatment or procedure that isn’t always better.

The providers in an ACO are responsible for managing the care of the health plan enrollees and are financially rewarded if the enrollees, or patients, stay out of the more expensive hospital.

“We are much better at managing the health care system and using nonphysicians,” Singleton said. “We are much better at using nurse practitioners and physician assistants.”

 

Obamacare forcing more paperwork on physicians....Patient health suffers! Hey...there are only 24 hours in a day!

Anyone that has seen a doctor lately is wondering “why didn’t my doctor look at me….Why was his head buried in that laptop”? The only answer is paperwork is forcing doctors to complete piles of forms to treat my cold & flu. What ever happened to checking my throat, looking down my mouth, and sending me home with antibiotics! This is ruining my healthcare!

 Obamacare Death by Paperwork

By Betsy McCaughey    July, 9^th 2014

On July 3, with Americans preparing to celebrate freedom, the Obama administration reduced freedom by adding 1,296 pages of new regulations to ObamaCare. It was a classic pre-holiday document dump, publishing the mind-numbing rules in the Federal Register on the eve of Independence Day, when few were likely to be watching. So much for transparency.

ObamaCare regulations compel doctors and their office staff, business owners, local officials and virtually everyone else subject to the law to spend hours filling out paperwork with no pay for their labor. It’s a colossal theft.

Now four years old, ObamaCare imposes 159 million hours of paperwork a year on the public. That’s the administration’s own estimate, undoubtedly a lowball.

Even so, it’s up by 48 million hours over last year, when fewer regulations had been rolled out. And there’s more to come.

Among the July 3 rules is one that compels doctors who take Medicare to report 18 different clinical measurements on their patients, such as whether they are overweight and have been counseled about weight control.

Doctors who fail to do it will get whacked with lower payments starting in 2015.

The regulators estimate that this single report could take as long as 108 minutes per patient and consume 5.4 million hours a year nationwide. That’s time that could be spent treating patients or calling them to remind them to take their meds.

Instead, the federal bureaucracy is confiscating those hours to serve its own ends.

Small-business owners get hit hard, too. Notably, restaurateurs face 622,000 hours of work to comply with ObamaCare’s menu-labeling rules.

The American Action Forum, a public-policy organization, notes that ObamaCare is in a class by itself, imposing almost three times as much paperwork as the notoriously complex Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and more than 10 times as much as under the Sarbanes-Oxley financial-reform law.

The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is the biggest culprit, responsible for 90 million hours a year of ObamaCare paperwork chores. Most are foisted on hospitals, doctors, insurers and local governments.

Because it includes the IRS, Treasury is the No. 2 culprit, with paperwork requirements up 23 percent this year. The IRS is ObamaCare’s chief enforcer; paperwork misery will continue to soar, especially if and when the employer mandate goes into effect.

ObamaCare gives the IRS 46 new functions, including collecting new taxes and exchanging information about you, your family and your income with HHS and state insurance exchanges.

For example, the IRS requires employers to report the value of insurance you get through work in a new box on your W-2, even though it’s not taxable (yet).

And dealing with the IRS is no longer a once-a-year affair. Have a baby, change jobs or get a divorce, and the IRS will be recalculating your insurance compliance and eligibility for premium subsidies.

“It’s unprecedented in recent history, the amount of responsibility the IRS is being given in an area that most people don’t think of as an IRS function,” J. Russell George, a tax official, told Congress last March.

The administration plainly doesn’t want to tell the truth about these burdens.

For example, it claims that people who are uninsured or lose coverage will spend 12.6 minutes a year to comply with the individual mandate. Preposterous: Even when the Web sites work, it takes far longer to shop for insurance and report to the IRS that you’re compliant.

On July 4, 1776, when American patriots signed their Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, they recounted the crimes of the tyrannical British king: “He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Nearly 2½ centuries later, our own government is eating out our substance with mandatory paperwork.

Not to mention the drag on our economy.

According to the Heritage Foundation’s 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, America is the only country to have lost economic freedom for seven straight years, now ranking 12th behind Hong Kong,
Singapore, Australia, Canada and seven other nations.

“Burdensome and redundant regulations are the most common barriers to the free conduct of entrepreneurial activity,” Heritage cautions.

But some benefit from this out-of-control regulatory state.

“Government bureaucracies like complexity because it keeps them busy and funded,” warns Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard. She laments that “as a result of these regulations on steroids, innovation, business creation and job growth are being stifled.”

Government bureaucrats are stealing our time, our economic growth and our liberty. Don’t count on Washington to fix the problem.

In the end, only an outraged public can put a stop to this regulatory oppression.

Betsy McCaughey is the author of “Beating ObamaCare 2014.”

 

Obamacare and Federal Law will be closing acute care (small) Hospitals!

Fourth Georgia hospital closes due to Obamacare payment cuts

From Sarah Hurtubise in The Daily Caller

The Federal Government forces hospital to treat (in the Emergency Room) anyone that comes through the door! Obamacare reduces the reimbursement rate, and tries to force states to expand Medicaid at the State’s expense. You tell me what state has a budget that would allow an unfunded Federal mandate? Read below to find out what happens next!

The fourth Georgia hospital in two years is closing its doors due to severe financial difficulties caused by Obamacare’s payment cuts for emergency services.

The Lower Oconee Community Hospital is, for now, a critical access hospital in southeastern Georgia that holds 25 beds. The hospital is suffering from serious cash-flow problems, largely due to the area’s 23 percent uninsured population, and hopes to reopen as “some kind of urgent care center,” CEO Karen O’Neal said.

Many hospitals in the 25 states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are facing similar financial problems. Liberal administration ally Think Progress has already faulted Georgia for not expanding Medicaid as Obamacare envisioned.

But the reality is more complicated. The federal government has historically made payments to hospitals to cover the cost of uninsured patients seeking free medical care in emergency rooms, as federal law mandates that hospitals must care for all patients regardless of their ability to pay.

Because the Affordable Care Act’s authors believed they’d forced all states to implement the Medicaid expansion, Obamacare vastly cut hospital payments, the Associated Press reports.

The Supreme Court ruled that states could reject the Medicaid expansion in 2012, as part of the decision that upheld Obamacare generally. Since that decision, the Obama administration has so far instituted 28 unilateral delays and changes to the health care law’s implementation without congressional approval, Fox Business reports.

From verifying eligibility for subsidies to enforcing employer requirements, the Obama administration has already taken a hacksaw to the health care reform law, but it has made no changes to the provision raising problems for half the nation’s hospitals.

While the feds wait for financial pressure to force states to act, several state governments have been taking things into their own hands. Some have criticized these moves as “hospital bailouts.”