Boo Radley
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2009
- Messages
- 37,066
- Reaction score
- 7,028
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
Re: Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequest
No, that Medicare patients will be screwed. They will. And in effect that is what this group will be doing. By seeking greater profit versus lessor profit (not no profit as you seem to suggest).
Not as huge absent those two specialties that mention to justify the cost to patients as it tends now. No. I have a brother in law who is a doctor and your numbers are off. After mal practice and student loan payments, taking Medicare patients, he clears 285 k a year.
Now, we both need more than our generalities and too small sample size, but no one seriously thinks physicians are only making 85k a year.
That is not at all what was charged. What was charged was that they were looking for ways to screw over Medicare patients and using sequestration as an excuse to do so. That these patients, were, in fact, still profitable, and that the companies in question were willing to A) lie about that and B) give up their own profits, apparently just so that they could then have the pleasure of denying care to Medicare patients. :roll: Utter horse-hockey.
As for profit - without profit, clinics cannot serve 3/3rds of patients. Doctors know enough math to realize that if you can still serve 2/3rds, that is more than 0/3rds, an insight that appears to have escaped (or, more likely, simply been been refused by) some on this thread.
No, that Medicare patients will be screwed. They will. And in effect that is what this group will be doing. By seeking greater profit versus lessor profit (not no profit as you seem to suggest).
Malpractice and administrative costs are and remain huge. I would agree that OB-GYN's are probably among the most expensive to ensure, but that was the one example I had seen first-hand. The point remains the same. If a Doctor is "profiting" $330K a year, but $125K goes to malpractice, $100K goes to administrative costs, and $20K goes to student loans, then he's actually only bringing in $85K a year. Cut his "profit" by a third (as in the example under discussion) to $220K a year, and he's in quite a pickle.
The refusal on the part of those who wish to simply cut reimbursement schedules to accept that doctors do not have a magic pile of never-ending money from which they can make good the resultant losses of providing care is now starting to prove disastrous for our elderly. There is, never has been, and never will be, such a thing as a free lunch, and when we make plans which assume its' appearance, we shouldn't be surprised when those plans go badly. This loss of coverage was entirely predictable, and thus widely predicted.
Not as huge absent those two specialties that mention to justify the cost to patients as it tends now. No. I have a brother in law who is a doctor and your numbers are off. After mal practice and student loan payments, taking Medicare patients, he clears 285 k a year.
Now, we both need more than our generalities and too small sample size, but no one seriously thinks physicians are only making 85k a year.