Re: Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequest
At best we suggested one company, not all doctors. Their excuse doesn't hold, so yes, that company, a very specific company I putting profit above care, which is screwing them.
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.
And no where did I deny doctors had student loans. That doesn't change what I said. They could still pay those loans and live very, very well on Medicare pay. No one is asking them to live anything but well.
Btw, ob gyn and peds are problem areas, but they don't make up all doctors. You should acknowledge that you're using the extreme to try and resent the whole.
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.
The rest you write is largely nonsense. Current healthcare reform is not what anyone wants
Really? You may want to write the Administration about that. They seemed
quite interested in getting it passed, oh, a couple of years back. Bragged about all the awesome things it would do (nobody who liked their insurance would lose it, premiums would go down by $2500 for a family, thousands of jobs would be created, et. al.)
.