No CJD doctor’s all over the country AREN’T opting out of medicare, medicaid, and private insurance. Some opt out of medicaid, fewer still opt out of medicaid, and fewer still opt out of all three (the elective procedure derm/plastics and the conc docs). Of course you don’t know what you are talking about so please feel free to ad more clueless quotes.

“What you mean to say is that opting out is not an option for those unwilling to risk their current standard of living”

You are good at trying to put words in peoples mouthes aren’t you CJD. Do you understand that over 1/2 of all health care dollars are provided by the feds? Do you understand that unless you are in a niche specialty, saying no to the big three means you don’t have patients. Do you know that private insurance rates directly key off medicare rates? Do you know how much of a total baffoon you come across with your clueless cutsy one liners? I doubt it, that requires a greater amount of introspection than you seem to have a capacity for.

What you mean to say is that opting out is not an option for those unwilling to risk their current standard of living. Endlessly bitching is their only option.

Do you realize how uneducated you sound about the system as it now stands when you make blanket statments like that? With the exception of niche specialties (derm, plastic surgery, conceierge medicine), opting out of the present system as it now stands is not an option. The vast majority of Americans are either medicaid, medicare or private insurance. Know what your talking about before you pontificate CJD.

Now those same people complain about how doctors values and sense of repsonsibility have eroded. Their professional autonomy has likewise been all but destroyed. No meaningful self-regulation is possible. Renegades can now only be dealt with by the coarse and cowardly hand of government bureaucrats. As noted by Frederick Hayek 70 years ago, government regulation of markets actually eventually works to undermine personal morality. Caveat emptor.

Kevin”

Nonsense. Stop trying to blame everyone else for the contracts you keep signing.

The courts have ruled such action to be illegal. All attempts by physicians to organize in an effort to bargain collectively have been deemed illegal by the courts, having labelled such action “price-fixing” or collusion.

The best we can hope for it to convince all doctors to drop everything, hoping that there is not a single hold out, because we have no power in numbers, by virtue of court order.

Know the facts.

“The operating doctor . . . ” might not have had privileges at the hospital she went to or at her nursing home. They might not have even been in the same community for all we know.

I guess we will have to take the writer’s word about the arrangements for her stress test. I also suppose it didn’t occur to her to ask, of if she was under the impression of being scheduled, to call the center to verify. And so the covering associate made the hospital visit, big deal. She whines as if she was abandoned, which does not appear to be the case.

I am sure the doctors who saw her in 1929 were also glad she was born then. They probably were paid in cash as people felt they had a moral obligation to pay their bills, something that many more people these days think is optional. Doctors were doctors then? Hard to know what that means, except perhaps that they were respected and valued more than today, even if they weren’t paid as well or trained as well. There was still time to fill up medical school curricula with Latin in those days.

“What does one devise from all this?” Good question. Maybe the malpractice premiums in her community are prohibitive for doctors in private practice. Are the doctors there worse than elsewhere or are the juries just more generous? Can a doctor in practice seeing patients like this writer afford the costs of practice business when his patients pay as the writer does, with Medicare, under Medicare fee limitations?

Fee for service isn’t the problem.
Price fixing is the problem.

Kevin