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Posts Tagged ‘doctor’
January 29th, 2014 at 3:09 pm
Economists’ Fear: ObamaCare Consolidates Health Care, Raises Price

“Health economists worry that mergers could end up increasing what you pay. Hospital systems can often negotiate higher rates with insurers for the same care,” says a report at CNN Money.

The mergers in question are the result of an incentive structure within Obamacare that gives financial rewards to doctors and hospitals that create “Accountable Care Organizations” (ACOs) that, according to the report, “coordinate treatments with the goal of delivering quality care for less.”

In order to increase their eligibility for ACO benefits, hospitals across the country are scooping up individual and small group medical practices. The reason this may be bad for patients is that mergers allow hospitals to increase their market share, giving them greater leverage to negotiate higher rates with insurance companies. Cigna, a health insurance company, has seen bills for routine procedures spike 300 percent to 500 percent after a hospital acquires a practice.

Of course, those increased costs are passed on to patients, many of whom may not realize it until they get hit with a new “facility fee” that tacks on $75 to $150 for a routine visit.

One would think that a program designed to deliver “quality care for less” would pass on the savings to the patient. Instead, it looks like patients will pay more while the federal government rewards hospitals for cornering the market.

September 17th, 2013 at 5:47 pm
ObamaCare in Your Bedroom?

The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Goldwater Institute are both warning of dire threats to privacy if ObamaCare’s financial incentives and penalties on doctors aren’t changed soon.

The health law’s ‘reforms’ “aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential,” writes Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post.

Topics include asking whether a patient is sexually active, and if so, with what number of partners. Whether a person has same-sex partners is also an area the feds want to know about.

And don’t forget to add in the required questions about a person’s drug history.

Combine this with all the routine yet highly sensitive health information people share with their doctor, and you’ve got the makings for a single-source document that could ruin someone’s life if made public.

To do this, ObamaCare uses financial pressure to compel doctors to participate. Answers go into federally mandated electronic health records. Highly portable, the records can be accessed and shared among regulators.

Resistance won’t be easy.

“Doctors and hospitals who don’t comply with the federal government’s electronic-health-records-requirements forgo incentive payments now; starting in 2015, they’ll face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid,” according to McCaughey. “The Department of Health and Human Services has already paid out over $12.7 billion for these incentives.”

And it’s just going to get worse.

Best advice: Try to convince your doctor to keep two sets of books. One that’s real; the other for the Feds.

ObamaCare: Bringing people together in opposition to their government.