ObamaCare Again

A reader commented on the prior email on ObamaCare that was posted as the pre-implementation effects of ObamaCare.   There is nothing in this subsequent email to disagree with as far as my understanding of the bill goes. It is simple economics. Price controls always cause quality and quantity to deteriorate. When constraints are particularly severe, supply completely disappears.

Better have your daughter or son marry a doctor who can help you when he or she gets off their day job which is likely to be outside the medical profession.

Here is the email:

This email is absolutely on the money and similar to what I am seeing in Houston, TX, even though Texas has weathered this economic storm pretty well.

Most people do not understand what the end-game of Obamacare truely is: it is the complete destruction of the private side of the private-public enterprise that is the American medical model.

Here is how it will go down, as I read the tea leaves.

Obamacare will destroy the private medical insurance industry, not that I have any love in my heart for them, they have behaved atrociously and will now reap what they have sown. The problem with this schadenfrueden view is that reimbursements from private insurers basically subsidize the less-than-cost reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid. Once this subsidy is gone, either because the insurance company is gone OR because their reimbursements fall to Medicare and below, hospitals and physicians offices will start to close. Our office recently received notice from Aetna that they will adopt in toto the Medicare reimbursement schedules in 2011. And so it begins.

I assure you, our costs in the healthcare industry have not diminished, in fact, with each new edition of the Federal Register, we are finding even more regulations/fines/taxes to comply with. Our lawyers and accountants have waded through the health care bill (yet another expense) and tell us that even more are on the way. At some point the declining reimbursement curve crosses the rising cost curve and then it is over, kaput, bumpkiss, put a fork in it. We can’t just print money when our cash flow goes negative, we just close our doors.

The job-killing effect of Obamacare are already being felt, adding even more people to the rolls of the unemployed and thus the uninsured.

There are tons of other examples I can give you about how this bill will destroy the private medical providers, but I think you get the picture.

So what happens when the 4000 community hospitals already on financial life support start to fail? What happens when physicians, and there are only 250,000 of us in the US, start shutting our doors? I won’t even comment on our refusal to accept Medicare/Medicaid – the states/feds will simply require participation in these programs for licensure, a la, Massachusetts.

Will the private medical providers now be “too big to fail”? Will we get a “bail out”? Ya buddy, when the fracking US is fracking broke, don’t hold your breath. Some providers think they will get some big juicy AIG money bomb, a sad delusion given how this administration talks about doctors, good luck with that.

We may, if we are politically connected to the right Congressperson, get a pennies-on-the-dollar bailout, just like what happened to the bondholders of GM and Chrylser. And we providers will be, essentially, nationalized.

Any of you ever taken a gander at your local charity hospital or clinic? Or been enmeshed in the byzantine rules/regulations of a VA hospital? Go right now, take a picture of it because that is going to seem like the good old days when Obamacare comes into its own.

Except your political elites, OF COURSE, they have exempted themselves from this insanity.

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