printDr. Ramin Oskoui spoke extremely knowledgeably, on the Laura Ingraham Show, about the precise connection between curtailed medical care and ObamaCare. These are a few of the many ways in which the creep-in-chief’s signature legislation will degrade American medicine:
* Cancer: The concept of personalized medical care and the use of specific, state-of-the-art drugs that work with the individual’s genetic make-up—these will diminish considerably. ObamaCare puts access to “crucial medical progress at great risk.”
* PET scans, for example, will be limited to three in a lifetime, although cancer patients often have that many during initial diagnosis.
ObamaCare aims to control costs, explained Dr. Oskoui. For cancer patients this is achieved by blocking the patient’s ability to seek out specialized doctors. Because insurance provides cannot adjust premiums and benefits, the only thing they can do to control costs is to limit access and care—they must limit the network of providers with which they contract.
Bundle payments: doctors get lump sums of money to care for patients with particular conditions. This coerces them to cut down on the use of costlier, newer drugs and tests. It also pits what the doctor earns for caring for these patients against his payment, reducing his incentives to offer the best of remedies if these are more costly.
After all, doctors in private practice are small businessmen. They cannot provide a service for less than it costs them to provide.
Even if ObamaCare collapses under its own weight, warns Dr. Oskoui, it has “already changed the medical landscape.” Many specialists have migrated to the hospital system because, as “favored providers,” hospital-based medics are allowed to bill more than they would when working for themselves.
Both the host and this intelligent cardiac surgeon have concluded that ObamaCare is not about the practice of medicine, but about wealth distribution.
It is a tax bill.
“The entire medical landscape,” observed Ms. Ingraham, “has shifted to help the few who didn’t want healthcare or couldn’t afford it. (A point made back in 2009 in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured.”)
Dr. Oskoui: ObamaCare has transferred financial risk to the providers of healthcare and away from Big Pharma, the insurers, those receiving healthcare. The latter, and the electronic health-records manufacturers, profit.
Again: it’s a wealth-transfer program; an entitlement program.