Let the Health Care Rationing Begin – A Cardiologist Speaks Out
Despite the ignorant protestations of the market illiterati of the Left, government rationing of health care services is right around the corner… the natural result of federal interference between doctors and patients. That interference is already resulting in doctors withdrawing from public, government-sponsored, health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, in favor of private pay practice, and reduced availability of medical services for those who need them most. The result, as predicted by conservatives, is fewer doctors available to treat more and more patients. More government interference, ObamaCare, means more demand for medical services and less supply to accommodate that demand… in other words, rationing.
As the health care debate continues in Washington, lost in the controversy is a little-known change in Medicare policy that threatens efficient access to lifesaving medical services for millions of heart and cancer patients.
If enacted as scheduled on Jan. 1, 2010, policy changes recommended by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — the government’s insurer for the elderly and disabled — will severely cut current Medicare reimbursements to cardiologists and oncologists for critical care services that are provided to patients in physicians’ offices or other out-of-hospital setting, such as chemotherapy to treat cancer, and various cardiac procedures to monitor and treat heart disease, such as nuclear imaging and heart catheterization.
These cuts will force cardiologists and oncologists to limit care to their Medicare patients, withdraw from treating Medicare patients altogether or require their patients to pay more out of pocket to make up the difference in the cost of these services.
Medicare and Medicaid amount to nothing more than government price-fixing for medical/health care services. What the author, cardiologist Arie Szatkowski, is saying is that when price is fixed below the actual, profitable cost of providing those services, the service providers will choose to leave the field. The very same point made three weeks ago by my friend Donny Baseball in his open letter to Leftist Loon, Anne Lamott, here.
Unless these proposed changes are rescinded, current and future cardiac and cancer care patients will suffer the consequences, especially in rural areas where the proportion of Medicare patients is exceptionally high and patients have fewer choices of health care providers.
Notice that the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement changes are being instituted not by legislation from Congress, but by unelected bureaucrats, the same sort of nameless lifers who now mismanage the IRS, TSA, and the Postal Service.
The changes certainly will force the closing of outreach clinics in rural areas, leaving many people without easily accessible cardiac or cancer care. They will be forced to travel to hospitals, sometimes long distances from home, and to wait for hours, if not days and weeks, for the tests and services they need…
Yet the policymakers at CMS, who base their decisions on numbers and statistics, are unilaterally and dramatically changing the delivery of heart and cancer care by proclaiming that care for heart disease and cancer is too costly, while treatment for other diseases has greater value.
… (T)he day is coming when Medicare patients — often the most vulnerable in our society — will wake up and realize they no longer have access to the timely and often urgent medical care they need.
The lesson in Dr. Szatkowski’s article is clear. In a country already being saddled with trillions in new debt by the Obama regime, there simply isn’t enough money to provide government paid health care for everyone who wants it. Nor are there enough doctors and other medical providers willing to work for government mandated wages. We cannot afford the entitlement obligations already on the books. Adding free health care for all, ObamaCare, is witless idiocy.
Let the rationing begin!
