January 21, 2010, - 10:34 am
AhnoldCare: Dr. Schwarzenegger Brings Mini-ObamaCare to California
Full-blown ObamaCare means the government controls the entire healthcare system, setting fees and virtually every other condition under which you see a doctor, take medicine, and/or get a surgical procedure (or don’t get one because the government thinks your life is no longer worth the cost).
(Arnold Drawing from Schlussel Wacky Packs Collection)
But, courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his consumer activist and HMO friends, California is set, next year, to begin mini-ObamaCare, with the state setting time limits for doctors who accept HMO patients in which to see patients. Beginning in 2011, family practitioners doctors must see patients within ten days of their first contact seeking an appointment, and specialists within 15 days of when a patient contacts them for an appointment. Doctors can extend the waiting period if they decide it will not harm the patient’s health, but there may be a whole bunch of paperwork associated with that, requiring the doctor to see the patient to establish a defense to the new guidelines.
Thanks, Ahnold . . .
And doctors who violate the new time periods for seeing patients will be fined. Imagine if your business was “fined” for not completing a job or a sale when the government says you should.
Ostensibly, this “solution” is aimed at the HMOs, themselves. But the punishment will actually be taken out on doctors and their patients. Doctors who accept HMO payment are already overloaded and only have a few minutes each per patient. HMO payments are such that they must see many patients in a given day in order to make decent money. This will make it such that doctors’ time will be stretched even further, lest they lose money because of the state-imposed “late fee” fines. And they’ll have to spend even less time per patient . . . or drop HMO coverage altogether. The second option wouldn’t be a bad thing, and it’s already the trend in medicine for many doctors who seek to spend more time with patients and charge out-of-pocket market-based prices (the way things used to be and to where they should return).
Essentially, the new California rules are a mini-version of ObamaCare . . . or a cleverly designed mechanism to try to convince the people of the most populus state in the Union to cry out for ObamaCare as a panacea to the overwhelming problems these new rules will create.
Gov. Schwarzenegger, who was involved in establishing these new rules for doctors, really earns his movie nickname, “The Terminator,” several times over. First, his crushing fuel efficiency rules destroyed over 50,000 auto industry jobs. And now, he’s ruining the medical profession. His political career can’t be terminated soon enough.
Wait, so if I want to really annoy a specific doctor, I should have all a bunch of homeless people call with questions so that doctor will have to see every uninsured homeless person for free and then go broke? What a country!
Fred Taub on January 21, 2010 at 11:01 am