The preferred Boulder Single Payer solution. You’re on the clock: Doctors rush patients out the door.
These days, stories like Eisenstodt’s are increasingly common. Patients — and physicians — say they feel the time crunch as never before as doctors rush through appointments as if on roller skates to see more patients and perform more procedures to make up for flat or declining reimbursements.
It’s not unusual for primary care doctors’ appointments to be scheduled at 15-minute intervals. Some physicians who work for hospitals say they’ve been asked to see patients every 11 minutes.
And the problem may worsen as millions of consumers who gained health coverage through the Affordable Care Act begin to seek care — some of whom may have seen doctors rarely, if at all, and have a slew of untreated problems.
Bring on Single Payer and Medicare. To listen to Boulderites and their fellow Progressive ilk, getting Single Payer will be like Moses parting the Red Sea.
“To listen to Boulderites and their fellow Progressive ilk, getting Single Payer will be like Moses parting the Red Sea.”
Oh absolutely. The challenge with Medicaid is getting people to a doctor when they need one, because not many doctors will take them. From what I’ve been hearing the only places that will really take them are big hospitals, and even then they will not get scheduled promptly, nor will they get quality care when they finally can see a doctor. It’s practically a scam. The proponents of this feel reassured now that anyone can get covered through Medicaid, if nothing else. The problem is actually getting treated when you have a problem. As a country we seem to have bought into our own lie that, “Well, as long as I’m covered I’m going to be okay.”
Insurance is not health care. It’s not hard to locate stories of Obamacare restricted networks, especially in California, where patients can no longer see their old doctors and in some cases can’t see a doctor at all. Most likely this is much more than a CA issue.
I suspect that Medicaid makes Medicare look like full service treatment. Keep in mind that Connect for Health Colorado had more Medicaid enrollments then people who actually signed up for Obamacare. The fact that Colorado expanded Medicaid to 133% of the Federal Poverty Level played a large roll in the skewing of the enrollment numbers. Another factor is if you signed up as a family and your income was less than 250% of the FPL, you received no premium assistance for your children and they were placed on CHP+. For practical purposes, CHP+ is Medicaid for children. You could reject your children being on CHP+ but then you would have to pay “list price” for them to be on the family plan. In the old days, list price might be affordable. In the new days of Obamacare, the coverage is so expensive that unless the applicants are asset rich and income poor, their children will end up on CHP+.
Another note on Medicaid, as I’m “between doctors” at the moment, so I’m visiting one of the mini-clinic type facilities to get my prescription refilled. Once the doctor, technically a nurse practitioner, found out I was involved with health insurance, she expressed her dismay regarding the low reimbursement rates when she sees Medicaid patients. The definite implication is she is starting to see more Medicaid patients, which due to the very low reimbursement rates, is affecting her livelihood.
Also, the State is going to have a budget issue when the cost of Medicaid becomes a budget issue. As the Federal government lowers how much they are going to pay and the state has to chip in more and more, we the people are going to be called in to bail the state out. I predict around that time, PERA will start having tough financial problems as well.