Health care reform in Massachusetts has led to a dramatic increase in the number of people with health insurance. But there’s an unintended consequence: A sudden demand for primary care doctors has outpaced the supply.
Kamela Christara appears at the triage window in the emergency room at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in western Massachusetts.
The 47-year-old single mother has advanced Lyme disease, and she can’t find a primary care doctor to oversee her care. She’s called half a dozen practices in three towns, and none are accepting new patients. So when problems come up, even routine ones, she comes to the emergency room. Each time, she goes through her medical history with the intake nurse.
I see Medicaid but many in my specialty are no longer. I can tell you that you are not going to solve the health care crisis by trying to make physicians “more efficient” by imposing more paper work responsibility on them and decreasing their remuneration. This was how a Medicaid HMO tried to do it here. It failed miserably.
[url=http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/12/08/prl11208.htm ]Doctors urge: Rescue primary care or work force shortage will mount[/url].
There was a recent article that I read somewhere where they are starting cap the administrative costs on insurance companies. Good.
Next, end direct to consumer drug ads for prescription medications. We all pay for this nonsense.
Yea…socialized medicine reall works…
Yep, you get what you pay for. There is no free lunch. Price controls ALWAYS equals shortages. Looks like they will just need to repeal that ole 13th ammendment. Cheers.
The 100% coverage for children in Hawaii lasted 7 months before it went broke. The only way socialized medicine can work is to create choke points by rationing of certain proceedures or limiting access to care.
In the short term it is expensive. But there are natural monopolies on health care – good people get turned down from medical school, and specialization is rewarded more than general practice.
What we did not note is that there are plenty of people who are benefiting from this change. People who didn’t get it from before.
We currently ration and limit access to care. You can’t just call up a doctor and ask for a physical exam without insurance.
John, sure you can call up a doctor and get a physical exam, if you can find one who does PE’s (not a heart surgeon, etc.) and if you can pay for it—or did you mean free? Besides, hardly any insurances will pay for a PE. They only pay for specific diseases, and not preventive medicine. I do them for free occasionally, and also for pay if I have the time. With the loss of primary care, there will be fewer who do this low a level of care. As for good people being turned down for med school, that has always been the case. In my day there were twenty applicants for each slot, now I am told thaer are only two. To get more in, there will be a need for more medical schools, and that means more money. The schools are full now. Everything has a cost. There is no free lunch.