by Austin Hill
A question for the American Medical Association: What were you thinking?
Despite the national news media’s near-complete refusal to
report it, the news was no less real. United Healthcare, a managed care health
services company based in Minnesota, is underway with laying-off
“thousands” of physicians in Connecticut.
The reason? The
company won’t dare say this, but they had to do something to stave-off their
decline in revenues, a phenomenon brought about by – you guessed it – the new federal
healthcare law, AKA “Obamacare.”
President Obama once famously promised “if you like your
doctor, you can keep your doctor,” but that promise is not being kept for
Medicare patients in Connecticut. The physicians who are losing their employment
are specifically assigned to treat Medicare benefits’ recipients there. And
this may be only the beginning of Medicare patients “losing their doctor,”
because the Obamacare law reduces funding for the elderly and disabled
recipients of Medicare benefits, just as it takes-on the burden of funding new
websites, databases, subsidies for those who will receive health insurance “for
free,” and lots and lots of new federal “administrators.”
The sad truth, though, is that the association that purports
to represent the entire medical profession – the “AMA” – actually supported Obamacare
for a time, before they officially and viscerally opposed it. And ironically, they opposed Medicare before
they officially and viscerally supported it.
Without any particular commitments to economic principles and with a
seemingly naive understanding of public policy, the AMA has welcomed the
government’s encroaching control over their profession.
It started in the early 1960’s when the idea of Medicare was
first proposed. The AMA warned their members that the government’s “intrusion”
in to their profession could disrupt doctor-patient relationships, and lobbied
Congress against passage of the Medicare legislation.
But soon after the implementation of Medicare, the AMA
recognized the benefits of the government’s steady stream of revenues and began
to support it. And for most of the last half-century or so the AMA has
aggressively lobbied Congress against any and all proposed Medicare funding
reductions.
In 2009 when Obamacare was originally proposed, the
association opposed the idea. By 2010, however, amid social pressure and
promises of good times for physicians from the administration, the AMA decided
that they sort of agreed to the Obamacare “in principle,” and refused to oppose
it. Then in 2012, after Obamacare had
become law and a couple of months before the November presidential
election, the AMA came out in full-force opposing Obamacare while urging its
members to vote for Mitt Romney.
Too little, too late, AMA. As President Thomas Jefferson
once said, “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a
government big enough to take away everything you have,” and the results of the
AMA’s foolish flirtation with the government’s redistribution of economic
resources illustrates this profound truth vividly.
As if this folly isn't sufficiently tragic, consider
this: as featured on the Fox
Newschannel, a private corporation called “Benefits
Coordinators” is on the prowl for prospective staffers to educate government employees on how to
utilize their health insurance benefits.
Apparently the health benefits plans that the federal government offers
its employees is so circuitous and confusing that the government “had to” hire
a private corporation to educate the recipients on how to use the benefits.
The company
advertises earnings of “$120,00 to $180,000 a year” for this kind of work. And
the expansion of the administrators’ roster is happening in the same week as
the reduction of the physicians’ list.
Our government is well on its way to producing less
healthcare and more bureaucratic red tape, all the while the cost of healthcare
rises for those who actually pay for it. Will Americans ever wake up to the
most basic principles of economic and public policy issues? Or will we continue
to childishly continue to believe in the magical promises of politicians?
Comments are invited!
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