Sunday, July 29, 2012

When Health Care is a Right...

...what happens when there are not enough doctors
But the provisions within the law are expected to increase the number of primary care doctors by perhaps 3,000 in the coming decade. Communities around the country need about 45,000.
One might envision several things: 1) patients will have to wait longer to get seen; 2) doctors might not be able to provide the same kind of service as before; 3) the government will be forced to assign doctors to 'underserved' regions, perhaps as a condition of a medical school student loan (overseen by the government)--or by more draconian means. But yeah, Obamacare is just a tax.

4 comments:

Right Truth said...

Answer: Nurse Practitioners. This will be a disaster, already is. Someone can get their BS in nursing, then go straight for the nurse practitioner, open an office and start treating patients. Compare that with the YEARS of schooling, training, practice, and experience a physician gets before he ever goes out on his own. We are already seeing patients being misdiagnosed, treated improperly, and it is bad news for patients.

Yes, they are "supervised" my physicians, but all this means is that a physician is assigned to them, reviews charts occasionally, end of story. They are not on site.

Debbie
Right Truth
http://www.righttruth.typepad.com

A.C. McCloud said...

How will they handle the liability?

LA Sunset said...

I have worked in healthcare for a million years. This is not going to be good.

We cannot ask people to shell out 100s of thousands of dollars to go to med school and not be able to recuperate their investment in a reasonable period of time. We cannot expect people who are trained to seek a diagnosis and treat it, to work countless hours to take care of more people than they already are.

Do we want a tired cardiac surgeon doing his 5th open heart surgery in a 24 hr period, doing ours, or someone we love?

I know some damned good NPs, but even at that there aren't enough to fill the void and it isn't fair to ask them to perform duties that they are not educated to do... and it's not fair to ask doctors who are responsible for the NPs to catch everything the NP may miss. Even the best drs. miss things.

As for the liability, I suspect the NP will need better malpractice insurance in the long run and it may even be high enough to dissuade them from getting into THEIR field. The answer will be more rationing of care, which will someday make the death panel a reality because giving care to a retired person who is not contributing anything to society will be deemed unnecessary.

In this, we see the irony of Progressive Politics as it applies to people and their health. They want us to not eat things that will make us die sooner, so we'll all live longer. But when we get sick when we are older, we will not get the care. Go figure.

A.C. McCloud said...

Once again the 'death panel' analogy used by Palin, although hyperbolic, was probably closer to the truth than advertised. That's probably why they overreacted. The math just isn't there.