Conscripting Doctors - Next logical step

[marincounty]

You had nothing compared to physicians responsibilities. You sat in some chair designing something which isn't going to die in your hands. You get to fix your mistakes. You don't have to wonder why the child died you couldn't save. You couldn't begin to do the job. Clearly you are overpaid in comparison. Hell, my wife has more education than you and virtually every physician I know but she gets it. Puts her ahead of you.

You have no idea what responsibilities I had. Sitting in a chair-not.
Overpaid, hardly-that's why I quit.
Of course I could do the job. My cousin is a doctor and does very well. I chose a different path in life.
My siblings have multiple advanced degrees but don't make nearly as much as my cousin.
You guys clearly don't want to face the reality. Everyone in the medical field in the U.S. is overpaid compared to the equivalent job in any other first world country.

 

[TheVrolok]

You have no idea what responsibilities I had. Sitting in a chair-not.
Overpaid, hardly-that's why I quit.
Of course I could do the job. My cousin is a doctor and does very well. I chose a different path in life.
My siblings have multiple advanced degrees but don't make nearly as much as my cousin.
You guys clearly don't want to face the reality. Everyone in the medical field in the U.S. is overpaid compared to the equivalent job in any other first world country.

Comparing physician pay in this country with most others is apples to oranges. I know our European counterparts aren't racking up 250-300k in loan debt just for medical school. Not even considering undergrad debt. The educational environment is vastly different.

Sounds to me like you've got nothing more than your personal uninformed opinion of the situation.

 

[CWRMadcat]

You have no idea what responsibilities I had. Sitting in a chair-not.
Overpaid, hardly-that's why I quit.
Of course I could do the job. My cousin is a doctor and does very well. I chose a different path in life.
My siblings have multiple advanced degrees but don't make nearly as much as my cousin.
You guys clearly don't want to face the reality. Everyone in the medical field in the U.S. is overpaid compared to the equivalent job in any other first world country.

How are doctors overpaid when they're going into debt and making a piss poor wage for 7-10 years of their life? Only an idiot goes into medicine to be rich. Competent engineers may not make as much as an attending physician, but they sure as hell earned considerably more while the physician to be was in training...

That doesn't even begin to cover the huge difference in liability between the professions.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

There is no need for anyone to be conscripted. We (our government) need to bust the AMA cartel which is artificially limiting supply of doctors by keeping down the number of medical schools.

The op-ed is just more "no-think" free market dogmatist fear mongering.

Public school teachers, police, and firemen are also government employees and no one goes around arguing that they are "conscripted".

Ironically, people are not running away from medical schools and the medical profession, but rather flocking to it in droves. Every year tens of thousands of qualified applicants are turned away by the lack of med. school seats.

Even under evil evil socialized medicine, doctors would still be well-compensated, and well-cared for and have high social status (but they might not have studen loan bills). Ironically, doctors might be happier since they would not have to deal with nearly as much paper work and medical billings BS that get the way of practicing good medicine. They might also enjoy being able to work with fewer conflicts of interest between their own financial and legal well being and that of their patients.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

For example, I have two friends who can't get employed full-time where I'm employed because the company has instituted a hiring freeze...because Obamacare has made them skittish. Naturally, this isn't Obamacare's fault. The company's just being greedy. The company should be interested in employing people first, and staying in business second.

When leftists accuse conservatives of seeking to impose their morality on others, it's downright comedic.

Why not blame the Republicans for standing in the way of single payer socialized medicine? Businesses don't have these kinds of problems in nations that have socialized medicine--businesses simply don't have to worry about health care benefit expenses and insurance issues.

 

[TerryMathews]

Why not blame the Republicans for standing in the way of single payer socialized medicine? Businesses don't have these kinds of problems in nations that have socialized medicine--businesses simply don't have to worry about health care benefit expenses and insurance issues.

Why? The same majority that passed PPACA could have passed Single Payer if all the Democrats were on board.

Not one Republican voted for PPACA. This is all the Democrats mess, top to bottom.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Why? The same majority that passed PPACA could have passed Single Payer if all the Democrats were on board.

Not one Republican voted for PPACA. This is all the Democrats mess, top to bottom.

The Democrats probably secretly wanted to have socialized medicine, but it might require changes to the nation's constitution and more than just a small majority of Congress would need to be on board. Also, politically, they would be roasted as being evil evil communists, and we can't have evil evil communists in our government, can we?

So, they voted in favor of a band-aid solution to our nation's health care problems.

Also note that if our health care system fails, the PPACA is NOT the cause nor the problem. Obamacare is NOT a health care system, but just a mandate for people to buy insurance and regulations on insurance companies. It isn't the underlying system itself of private insuance companies, private hospitals, wealthy insurance company execs, advertising agencies, etc. That system pre-dated Obamacare and was a trainwreck long before anyone had heard of Obama.

It should also be noted that when the Democrats tried to take steps in the direction of implementing socialized medicine (Hillary Care) that the Republicans supported a plan very similar to Obamacare (to keep their rich insurance company donors in business). In fact, the idea of the individual mandate came from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

 

[Nebor]

Conscription of doctors or any functionally equivalent action will not happen. Period.

There's no other logical end to our path. It will happen. Doctors will be required to accept medicare\medicaid (and possibly all insurance.)

Until then, big business medicine will continue to bring in foreign doctors at lower wages, just like other businesses do in other fields.

 

[TerryMathews]

The Democrats probably secretly wanted to have socialized medicine, but it might require changes to the nation's constitution and more than just a small majority of Congress would need to be on board. Also, politically, they would be roasted as being evil evil communists, and we can't have evil evil communists in our government, can we?

Again, they're already on the receiving end of that.

Do you think they didn't know they were going to be lambasted? I know Obama was naive but the entire Democratic party?

Face it, we dont have socialized medicine because the Dems weren't on board with it, probably due to insurance lobbyists since PPACA is the biggest gift to the industry in a while.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

What's the difference between requiring a doctor to accept medicaid patients at 40% of the actual cost to treat them in order to practice, versus conscripting a doctor to work for free?

So you're saying that if a doctor wanted to retire, he would be forced to continue practicing medicine at gunpoint? Doctors' jobs are protected by licensure requirements and accepting certain types of patients is a part of that protection against competition from doctor wannabees and Noctors.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Face it, we dont have socialized medicine because the Dems weren't on board with it, probably due to insurance lobbyists since PPACA is the biggest gift to the industry in a while.

In other words, they may have secretly supported socialized medicine in principal, but as a practical matter, they realized that it was politically infeasable.

I'm not a particularly big fan of the Democrats by any means. I wish some of them would grow some balls and backbones and tell the American public what's really wrong with our health care system. However, the Republicans deserve the overwhelming lion's share of the blame for our health care mess. If all of our politicians supported socialized medicine they would no longer need to keep it a secret. If the Republicans were on board, they could get it done.

I guess what I hope to accomplish in these threads is to affect the narrative of the failure of Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act so that the blame lands where it belongs.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

We treat doctors like gods in this country, and pay them accordingly. We will never have affordable health care in this country until medical workers are paid what normal people make. Nurses here make over a hundred thousand per year. Doctors make way more.
IMHO all the employees at the hospital make too much.

Doctors and hospital employee compensation is not the problem, even though doctors are well paid (and in some cases, very well).

The problem is that a large percentage of our health care expenditures are being spent on employees and executives who do not provide any actual health care but instead push paper around--all insurance company employees and execs, overpaid hospital execs and board members, accountants, insurance brokers, businesses' HR benefits people, insurance/hospital advertising, etc.

 

[TerryMathews]

In other words, they may have secretly supported socialized medicine in principal, but as a practical matter, they realized that it was politically infeasable.

I'm not a particularly big fan of the Democrats by any means. I wish some of them would grow some balls and backbones and tell the American public what's really wrong with our health care system. However, the Republicans deserve the overwhelming lion's share of the blame for our health care mess. If all of our politicians supported socialized medicine they would no longer need to keep it a secret. If the Republicans were on board, they could get it done.

I guess what I hope to accomplish in these threads is to affect the narrative of the failure of Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act so that the blame lands where it belongs.

No. Just no. The PPACA is the largest change to the health care system since the establishment of the FDA. It was passed and signed into law by the Democrats.

Success or failure, it belongs entirely to the Democrats. It cannot, by definition, be the Republicans fault. We had nothing to do with it.

 

[OverVolt]

Doctors are not required to accept Medicaid, nor is there any plan to require acceptance of Medicaid patients as a condition of practicing medicine.

Just how far they had to reach in order to make this sort of claim is pretty obvious in that the best citation they could find to make such a statement was a candidate for a state level house seat. If you want to go down that road and see what Republican candidates for state level house seats have said it will get very ugly very quickly.

Its the inevitable direction once you start down the slippery slope and keep tilting it.

Other than pie in the sky nonsense, if you want to increase access and reduce costs at the same time you are going to have to increase supply, alot.

The insurance companies have mandated margins now, and the hospitals are non-profit, guess whose salary gets pinched? Doctors are going to be overworked 10 years from now, guaranteed.

Its not that difficult, its so simplistic the lefties over look all the basics because its not overly complicated nor requires 1,000 research journals to understand. Simply isn't sexy for democrats but they desperately need some common sense.

There is no clever way to bend the market to their will, sorry. No matter how many times they shuffle money around if we have the same number of doctors taking the same number of patients there are still going to be the same number of people who need a doctor but can't get one.

This is why alot of these systems cause massive shortages or surpluses depending on which brand of poor execution is carried out. Canada has imaging shortages. I wonder that flavor or shortage and overcapacity is heading to us via the ACA.

 

[5150Joker]

There is no need for anyone to be conscripted. We (our government) need to bust the AMA cartel which is artificially limiting supply of doctors by keeping down the number of medical schools.

It's not only that, the AMA has only half heartedly pushed for more residency training spots. They have also actively lobbied against US citizens that studied in the Caribbean because they feel threatened by a larger influx of qualified physicians that aren't under their thumb.

 

[FerrelGeek]

Conscription of doctors or any functionally equivalent action will not happen. Period.

You're sounding more like your messiah every day.

 

[Moonbeam]

You're sounding more like your messiah every day.

That's because you project your conservative altered reality thinking and see in others your own patterns, imagining your truthiness to be the condition of others. It leaves you making accusations rather than producing rational and reasoned arguments like eskimopsy does.

 

[BoberFett]

Why not blame the Republicans for standing in the way of single payer socialized medicine? Businesses don't have these kinds of problems in nations that have socialized medicine--businesses simply don't have to worry about health care benefit expenses and insurance issues.

How does single payer fix the problem? Seriously. I'd like to know.

 

[berzerker60]

How does single payer fix the problem? Seriously. I'd like to know.

Depends on how you define "the problem," I guess.

If you see the problem as overall medical costs, it cuts the deadweight that is the entire insurance industry and all the bureaucracy hospitals and doctors have to deal with them - this would be a short term hit for sure in terms of lost jobs, but we can't keep around useless parts of the economy just because they create jobs. Also, since employers wouldn't be on the hook for providing medical care anymore, they could hire employees just based on actual salary, which would save them tons of money and create incentives to move to the US (or stay here) to do business. Possibly some of those savings would be passed on in terms of compensation for employees, creating overall demand, though I'm not holding my breath. There would still be factors that need dealing with separately, like hospitals running a million tests to prevent getting sued and so forth, but it would be a big step.

If you mean the ER visits problem, it would still probably be around for the reasons you and others have mentioned, at least until we expand the supply of doctors through reforming the residency programs.

As with any system, you can imagine ways in which it would fail. That's why we look at real world examples, and at history, as actual evidence (this is the part where libertarian hand-waving about how the free market will always be perfect always fails, because they never bother to check against actual history). Single-payer works much much better than our system, now or before the ACA, in a lot of other comparable countries. US health care before the ACA was a disaster (not that it's not still pretty awful now, just arguably less bad - and even if you think it's worse now, by any reasonable metric other than 'serves the rich,' you have to agree it was a disaster before).

 

[1prophet]

There's no other logical end to our path. It will happen. Doctors will be required to accept medicare\medicaid (and possibly all insurance.)

Until then, big business medicine will continue to bring in foreign doctors at lower wages, just like other businesses do in other fields.

This, I think people are getting hung up on the word conscription thinking something along the lines of a military draft, instead all they have to do is require them to accept certain insurance like Medicare\Medicaid a condition of their license to practice medicine similar to how an emergency room can't deny a patient.

 

[TerryMathews]

This, I think people are getting hung up on the word conscription thinking something along the lines of a military draft, instead all they have to do is require them to accept certain insurance like Medicare\Medicaid a condition of their license to practice medicine similar to how an emergency room can't deny a patient.

Yes, and if you consider conscription to mean forced service it even technically meets the definition although not in the usual and understood manner.

 

[BoberFett]

Depends on how you define "the problem," I guess.

If you see the problem as overall medical costs, it cuts the deadweight that is the entire insurance industry and all the bureaucracy hospitals and doctors have to deal with them - this would be a short term hit for sure in terms of lost jobs, but we can't keep around useless parts of the economy just because they create jobs. Also, since employers wouldn't be on the hook for providing medical care anymore, they could hire employees just based on actual salary, which would save them tons of money and create incentives to move to the US (or stay here) to do business. Possibly some of those savings would be passed on in terms of compensation for employees, creating overall demand, though I'm not holding my breath. There would still be factors that need dealing with separately, like hospitals running a million tests to prevent getting sued and so forth, but it would be a big step.

If you mean the ER visits problem, it would still probably be around for the reasons you and others have mentioned, at least until we expand the supply of doctors through reforming the residency programs.

As with any system, you can imagine ways in which it would fail. That's why we look at real world examples, and at history, as actual evidence (this is the part where libertarian hand-waving about how the free market will always be perfect always fails, because they never bother to check against actual history). Single-payer works much much better than our system, now or before the ACA, in a lot of other comparable countries. US health care before the ACA was a disaster (not that it's not still pretty awful now, just arguably less bad - and even if you think it's worse now, by any reasonable metric other than 'serves the rich,' you have to agree it was a disaster before).

While some of what you said are definite benefits, such as removing the burden of healthcare from employers, I chuckle when you talk about removing the insurance bureaucracy and replacing it with an efficient government bureaucracy...

Libertarian hand-waving is no worse than liberal hand-waving in claiming that if only the government was running things, it would all just magically work better.

 

[berzerker60]

While some of what you said are definite benefits, such as removing the burden of healthcare from employers, I chuckle when you talk about removing the insurance bureaucracy and replacing it with an efficient government bureaucracy...

Libertarian hand-waving is no worse than liberal hand-waving in claiming that if only the government was running things, it would all just magically work better.

That government bureaucracy is there anyway for Medicare, this would just expand that. I'm sure there would be some inefficiency, and you'd always have to continue to be on the lookout for corruption, but real world examples across the first world show substantially more efficient and effective health care than we have.

I agree that you can make any ideology work in theory, which is why we need to check against reality whenever possible.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Success or failure, it belongs entirely to the Democrats. It cannot, by definition, be the Republicans fault. We had nothing to do with it.

The Republicans had plenty to do with it by standing in the way and opposing a much better plan. The entire backbone of the ACA was a Republican proposal to stave off socialized medicine, (aka "Hillary Care"), back in the early 'Nineties. The Republicans also failed to propose any real solutions to our nation's health care problem and opposed socialized medicine. There will be plenty of blame to go around for both sides, but the Republicans deserve most of it.

The Republican plan for health care is...maintain the status quo? Don't get sick and if you do get sick, die quickly? Why should they be given a free pass on that?

 

[WhipperSnapper]

There is no clever way to bend the market to their will, sorry. No matter how many times they shuffle money around if we have the same number of doctors taking the same number of patients there are still going to be the same number of people who need a doctor but can't get one.

This is why alot of these systems cause massive shortages or surpluses depending on which brand of poor execution is carried out. Canada has imaging shortages. I wonder that flavor or shortage and overcapacity is heading to us via the ACA.

You make it sound as thought he pre-Obamacare status quo was some sort of a paradise without any shortage of doctors or medical care. Free market medicine would have an adequate supply of doctors for the upper classes would end up having a large shortage of doctors for the poor (often the sick) and the lower classes.