Another example of how patients don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes:
“At some point, the doctor can’t justify accepting an insurance that’s not meeting his cost of business,” Rietsema said. “The typical primary-care provider has an overhead of 60 to 70 percent. In the end, sometimes the doctor has no other choice” than to not accept a particular coverage.“Patients will think that they have good insurance coverage, but they don’t realize their doctor is not getting a reasonable compensation for their services,” he added.
When doctors do discontinue relations with a specific insurer, it is with the hopes that that action will force insurers to renegotiate their contract with the physician to provide better reimbursements, Rietsema said.
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Don’t think that isn’t part of the plan. The insurancer company then wins twice. They are paying less for services when they are provided, but fewer enrollees avail themselves of the service when they have a lot of trouble finding a doc who is actually on the panel and taking patients (as opposed to the ghost panel used to lure subscribers).
Price controls=shortages. Everytime, always, throughout history.
At some point the “physician shortages” cry loses its luster when you use it to justify every piece of pro-doc legislation there is.
Geez – I haven’t seen any pro-doc legislation that was passed federally. If anything, it was squashed out of existence by the Democrats.
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