ObamaCare Cost Trends

What is really at stake in the fight to repeal ObamaCare?
by Carrie Lukas

Will it be a job killer? Absolutely. Will it do real and significant damage to the economy? For sure, as the CBO confirmed just last week when it reported that the real price tag will be upwards of $1.76 trillion over 10 years.

Here's another under-covered drawback to ObamaCare: It will fundamentally change the ethics in the medical profession.

Writing at Reason.com, practicing surgeon Jeffrey Singer lays out in explicit detail the increasing bureaucratization of the medical profession, and what that kind of top-down command is doing to the practice of medicine:

[Gradually the medical profession has been forced to give up this [the Hippocratic] approach for what I like to call a “veterinary ethic,” one that places the interests of the payer (or owner) ahead of the patient. For example, when a pet owner is told by a veterinarian that the pet has a very serious medical condition requiring extremely costly surgery or other therapy, the veterinarian presents the pet’s owner with one or more options—from attempt at cure, to palliation, to euthanasia—with the associated costs, and then follows the wishes of the owner.

ObamaCare represents the culmination of a major paradigm shift in the practice of medicine — one that reorients the system from serving the needs of patients where decisions are made between individuals and their doctors, to a system where doctors become wards of the state, serving the interests of their big government bosses who ultimately pay their bills.

Dr. Singer goes on to lay out the stark reality of the threat this poses to medical ethics:

[Hospital administrators will have more control over their medical staff. If doctors don’t follow the protocols and guidelines, and desired outcomes are not reached, hospitals can replace the “problem” doctors.

So where does all this place the medical profession with respect to its ethical credo? In a few years, almost all doctors will be employees of hospitals and will be ordered to practice medicine according to federally prescribed guidelines—guidelines that put the best interests of the state ahead of the interests of individual patients.

When the physician’s primary obligation is to satisfy the wishes of the payer—ultimately the wishes of the state—how can patients be truly confident in their doctors’ decisions?

This is the coming crisis. And this is why repeal of ObamaCare is imperative.

Later this week, the House of Representatives will have the opportunity to vote to repeal one of the ObamaCare-created systems Dr. Singer highlights as a major component to this threat to the very nature of our medical care — the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB.

Please call or email your Congressman today. Tell him or her of the threat ObamaCare and IPAB pose to the integrity of the medical profession and to the quality of care patients will receive.

Tell your Congressman that there is no better place to start removing the ObamaCare cancer from America than with repeal of IPAB.

Source: Carrie Lukas VP of Policy & Economics Independent Women's Voice, 3/19/12

NTL Comment:
The fact that Physicians will be working for hospitals has economic consequences we’ve seen before. Add more federal control over healthcare and bureaucracy explodes. This would really be “death by a thousand permits”. I can’t think of another thing that would continue to explode medical costs. ObamaCare was brought to you by the same crowd that wants to increase the cost of everything 5 fold as soon as they can, so they can crash our economy and establish their Soviet Gulags.

Government likes to build very expensive buildings where nothing much good goes on, like public schools, bureaucrats’ cubicles and legislative chambers.

A better approach would be to look toward home health care with doctors in charge and remove the federal government control of healthcare by transferring Medicare, Medicaid and all other functions to the states.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader.