Interesting looks at health care

As the nationalization of the finest health care system in history goes merrily on it's way I found these two articles interesting.

Dealing With Doctors Who Take Only Cash

A few weeks ago, my wife and I were at our wits' end: our 4-month-old daughter wouldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time at night. We had consulted books and seen our pediatrician, but nothing was working. So my wife called a pediatrician who specializes in babies who struggle with sleep problems.

The next day, he drove an hour from Brooklyn to our house. He then spent an hour and a half talking to us and examining our daughter in her nursery. He prescribed some medicine for her and suggested some changes to my wife's diet. Within two days, our baby was sleeping through the night and we were all feeling better.

The only catch was this pediatrician did not accept insurance. He had taken our credit card information before his visit and given us a form to submit to our insurance company as he left, saying insurance usually paid a portion of his fee, which was $650.

A couple of weeks later, our insurance company said it wouldn't pay anything. Here's how the company figured it: First, it said a fair price for our doctor's fee was $285, about 60 percent less, because that was the going rate for our town. Then, it said the lower fee was not enough to meet our out-of-network deductible.

While we were none too happy with the insurance company, we remained impressed by the doctor: he had made our baby better and was compensated for it, all the while avoiding the hassle of dealing with insurance.

Last year, I wrote about doctors who catered only to the richest of the rich and charged accordingly. But after my experience, I became interested in doctors for the average person who take only cash. What pushes a doctor to go this route, often called concierge medicine? And how hard is it to make a living?

As to why doctors decide to switch to a concierge practice, the answer is almost always frustration.

"About four years ago, one insurance company was driving me crazy saying I had to fax documents to show I had done a visit," said Stanford Owen, an internal medical doctor in Gulfport, Miss. "At 2 a.m., I woke up and said, 'This is it.' "

Dr. Owen stopped accepting all insurance and now charges his 1,000 patients $38 a month.

"When I decided to abandon insurance, I didn't want to lose my patient base and make it unaffordable," he said. "I have everything from waitresses and shrimpers to international businessmen. It's a concierge model, but it's also the personal doctor model."

Dr. Owen, who once had three nurses and 10 examining rooms, said it was now just him and a receptionist. He has become obsessed with keeping overhead low, but he said that, for the first time since the 1990s, his income was going up.

Interesting read all in all. When I was in my second misguided college youth during the 90s I went to a doctor from time to time and paid him directly. Once I paid for a fifty dollar fee with three twenty dollar bills. The clerk had a bit of a problem. She had no cash to make change. Fortunately one of the other clerks has change and the crisis was averted.

However I find the term "concierge model" strange. Why is it a doctor must take insurance? For most of man's history doctor's were paid like this. You come in for something, you pay for the service at the time of the service or soon afterwards. Seems to work with mechanics, groceries, etc. Why is medicine different? I know many wil scream "You have a right to health care regardless of ability to pay!" or some such dribble as that. But do you? Can you take the fruits of my labor (college, medical school, etc) at a much lower rate than I am willing to pay for it.

One of the predictable side effects of Obamacare/Single Payer System (assuming they are not killed off) is the increased shortage of doctors. If you want proof, look at England and Canada. One thing these libtards don't get is Medicine is a Science and an Art. But it is also a business. Now you take a sharp kid in high school who says "I wanna be a doctor..." we know one of the reasons is the money. Then tell him if he wants to to be a MD he can look forward to four years of college in an actual major where you spend your time in the library studying. Then four years of medical school all the while building up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Then residency of four to seven years. Then after all that the government will tell you how much you can make, where you can work, how many patients you will see, etc.

Or the kid can major in business and make a fortune in the market.

Now remember when B Hussein Obama said "If you like your doctor you can keep him. If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it." Well, that looks like it's "nonoperative':

Small Employers Weigh Impact of Providing Health Insurance

Like many franchisees, Robert U. Mayfield, who owns five Dairy Queens in and around Austin, Tex., is always eager to expand and — no surprise — has had his eyes on opening a sixth DQ. But he said concerns about the new federal health care law had persuaded him to hold off.

"I'm scared to death of it," he said. "I'm one of the ones sitting on the sidelines to see what's really going to happen."

Mr. Mayfield, who has 99 employees, said he was worried he would face penalties of $40,000 or more because he did not offer health insurance to many of his full-time workers — generally defined as those working an average of 30 hours a week or more. Ever since the law was enacted in 2010, opponents have argued that employers who were forced to offer health insurance would lay off workers or shift more people to part-time status to compensate for the additional cost. Those claims have drawn considerable attention — and considerable anger in response — in recent weeks.

John H. Schnatter, the chief executive of Papa John's, the pizza chain, said some franchisees were likely to reduce their employees' hours to avoid having to provide coverage. And an unhappy Denny's franchise owner in Florida warned that he would raise prices 5 percent as a "surcharge," adding that disgruntled customers could offset that by reducing their tips.

Some health care experts said comments like those came from outliers and sometimes resulted from confusion about a highly complicated new law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Many of the provisions do not go into effect until 2014. Federal officials are still tweaking the fine print, like defining exactly what constitutes a 30-hour workweek. Even so, restaurants and hotels are among the industries likely to be squeezed the hardest by the law because they are low-wage industries that do not offer coverage to most of their workers.

Most employers, even small businesses, already offer health insurance, and the federal law is not expected to have a significant impact on what they do over the next year or so. But businesses that rely heavily on low-income workers, many of whom do not make enough to afford their share of the cost of the insurance premiums, are being forced to rethink their business models...

Anyone who looked at this clusf%^& of legislation saw all this coming. Everything that could have been done to lower cost (law suit reform, letting insurance companies sell across state lines) was kept of out of it. Mandating things often times not needed (like pap smears for men), stopping the construction of more hospitals, etc will do nothing but limit the supply of medical services and raise cost. And the government will be there to ration care.

Again, to all the Obamaites out there, thanks!