Originally Posted by
David88vert
Fact: USPS has posted net losses since 2007.
Fact: USPS posted a loss of $237 million for just the last quarter.
Fact: USPS projects a shprtfall of $238 billion by 2020.
Fact: USPS lost my latest paycheck, so I put through the paperwork to convert payroll to direct deposit.
Poor service equals lost customers.
Now let's look at the situation with healthcare.
Doctors are paid by insurance and Medicare for every patient they see according to why they see the patient, and what procedures they perform for the patient, and not by the amount of time they spend with the patient - patients can expect to spend no more than 10 to 16 minutes with their doctor, depending on the agreement with the insurance provider. It varies from insurance plan to insurance plan, or from Medicare or Medicaid. Bottom line - doctors are paid for the number of patients and number of procedures, and not how much time any of those take, there is a real incentive for the doctor to spend as little time as possible with each patient.
Now if Obama limits the amount allowed for procedures, what will doctors have to do?
Lower their standard of living? Drop their expensive malpractice insurance? Not pay back their massive student loans? Work more hours? No, they won't.
Time is constant. There are only 24 hours in a day. In order to make up for the lowered income, they will either have to cut expenses by firing employees (not an option with small offices), or will have to increase the amount of patients seen during the same amount of time. That means that they will spend even less time reviewing your records before prescribing you a "magic pill" - or worse, a procedure that you don't need, but pays a higher rate to them. This is generally considered a lowering of standards and quality. Is that what you want for your children's health -to lower the quality of care?
"In the United States, only about a third of our doctors are primary care and we've been seeing lately that there's actually been a growing disinterest in this field for many of our U.S. medical graduates. So we have created incentives in part through higher salary to specialists. We have many more of our students going into specialty care" - Dr. Andrew Bindman of the University of California, San Francisco