With a likely Democratic-controlled government arriving soon, universal coverage will be the hot topic. Politicians better remember that physician access will be the key to making it work, or else you’ll have a Massachusetts situation with newly insured patients flooding the emergency room.
Doing what Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is doing is precisely not what to do. M-Care is the state’s supplemental insurance program that helps fight the costs of malpractice premiums. To push his political agenda, the Governor is withholding funds until doctors buy into his version of universal care:
Pennsylvania’s physicians are willing to provide health care for those who can’t afford it. More than 90% of us accept Medicaid despite reimbursements that are obscenely low and have not been raised since 1989. But what I, and other doctors, object to is being extorted to fund the governor’s sociopolitical agenda.I hope the legislature resolves this unseemly debacle appropriately by directing M-Care to start spending its funds on the program’s stated purpose (cutting the cost of liability insurance) before year’s end.
But in the meantime, if you are a woman with a high-risk pregnancy who is unable to find an obstetrician in the rural areas between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, or if you can’t find a neurosurgeon on trauma call in the two-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Erie, call Mr. Rendell. He can tell you about his plans to “cover all Pennsylvanians.”
Doctors will simply leave the state if they are coerced into reform that is not favorable.
Like it or not, we are the backbone of any reform plan to cover everyone. If we are left out of the political process, any proposed plan is doomed to fail.
Related posts:
- Universal health care = political suicide?
- Will the lack of primary care doctors make universal coverage useless?
- The AMA is adjusting its strategy to a Democratic congress
- My take: Dr. Nurses, supporting universal care
- Taxing doctors for universal care
- Universal coverage without primary care
- Universal health care: Slim chance?
{ 3 comments }
Hard to imagine a governor more hostile to physicians than “Fast Eddie” Rendell. He’s what you’d expect from a Philadelphia trip-and-fall lawyer placed in charge of Pennsylvania’s health care.
Rendell has cost my group $90,000. Politics and healthcare do not go together. That is precisely why I am not in favor of a government run system.
Any reform WILL get screwed up. You guys who think that someone somewhere will get it right display a vast gap of understanding regarding just how little the officials understand. They think that if 90% of the physicians take medicaid, then medicaid is obviously paying too much.
The unfortunate presence of crooks in medicine trying the game the medicaid system get those who run it to be so cynical eventually that they get paranoid about docs in generally or at least become resistant to believing that most participants just do so as an act of charity.
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