Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Doc's on the Record

Dr Marc Siegel, a New York internist, has some storm warnings for folks who think that ObamaCare© is a good idea:

"More than 40 local and national medical societies representing over half a million doctors came out against the health reform legislation."

That's a lot of providers who don't think that this will end happily. Dr Siegel may, in fact, be a closet IB reader: he posits that covering all those pre-existing conditions will inevitably cause insurance rates to rise (although, to be fair, we're far from the only ones who've made this point). The more immediate problem, as he sees it, is that doctors will be seeing a lot more patients for a lot fewer dollars, at a time when their own overhead is rapidly increasing.

The other major disaster looming on the good doctor's horizon is the coming shortage of physicians. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, it's expected that we'll be shy some 160,000 (that's thousand!) doctors over the next decade and a half.

My only complaint with Dr Siegel's analysis is that he seems to be laboring under the mistaken belief that this was ever about health care in the first place.
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