Minnesota Public Radio: Doctor as renegade — accepts cash, checks, eggs or pie, not insurance
Doctor as renegade — accepts cash, checks, eggs or pie, not insurance
Comments
3 responses to “Doctor as renegade — accepts cash, checks, eggs or pie, not insurance”
-
Does everything have to crash before our legislators wake up and smell the coffee?
Not only is insurance getting more expensive, the insurance companies are reimbursing doctors less. My two ENT doctors can’t maintain their little practice because they can’t make the overhead. They have had three part time employees (no benefits), and me the transcriptionist (depending on who’s on vacation, $500-$1000 per month, so not an enormous expense). They do have a few pieces of expensive equipment that have to be maintained, and surgical-type supplies to re-stock in the office, besides the other usual expenses. The practice is about to be absorbed into a very large primary care group run by our town’s Adventist hospital (at least it’s not for profit, but it also is not always managed well), because it’s either do that or give up being the only ENT doctors for this community, which includes two counties and part of a third.
Their employees will be absorbed by “the Borg”, one becoming full time with benefits, so at least they will have jobs. But they all will lose a lot of freedom that goes with being able to have an independent practice, which the older dr. has built up over +30 years. I will lose more than half my income from this client, because the big group uses the hospital’s transcription service. Under government Rural Health clinic rules, there’s some kind of an exception to that for doctors age +65, and my older dr. wants to keep me (well, they both want to, but the younger one will not be allowed to), so that will be negotiated over the next couple of months.
I will be able to pick up some work from my other client to compensate, but I don’t know yet if it’s going to be enough to make up the difference. So that’s my pwn story wrt the impact of the current economic woes.
It’s not only that my income will be affected. I’ve heard lots of stories, working in this aspect of health care. Simply as a patient, now getting older and with some chronic health concerns, I feel like I’m squeezed in a Chinese finger puzzle: if you pull at all, there is no way out. It seems like the for-profit insurance companies -not to mention drug companies- hold all the cards. I can hardly imagine how under-insured working people can even manage, when with insurance my one blood pressure medication is $1.35 per pill (at 50% of retail!). From all I’ve read, a model like what the French or the Swiss have seems to be the best, but I’d settle for Canadian-style any day.
I’m just so thoroughly discouraged with Congress about this and have been for quite a while. It seems no one is listening, or that everyone’s pockets alike have been lined with corporate health care industry money and they are powerless to do more than the bare minimum which is the Affordable Health Care Act. I find it highly ironic that the Tea Party/Republicans fought so hard against it and now want to repeal “obamacare”, when it was their plan in the first place!
Thanks for letting me take up a little ranting space.
Dana -
Still don’t have the hang of those HTML tags.
D. -
Health care “reform” is about federal power, not quality or access. Complex and bad policy is just job security for them, because rather than backing off and letting markets work, they’ll just claim we need them in DC all that much more to keep tinkering and building on their mess.
Leave a Reply