Let’s Enslave Doctors To Save Obamacare!

Here we go. Obamacare isn’t even in place and already the left has discovered a horrible, horrible flaw: doctors aren't slaves. As long as doctors have the freedom to choose to forgo the glorious adventure of Obamacare and engage in private practice on their own terms, the system will fail. Why? Because greedy doctors don’t want to work for free. And if they won’t work for free, then Obamacare will bleed doctors until it collapses. What’s a good Marxist to do? How about stopping doctors from escaping the system?

When England socialized its medicine, it banned doctors from engaging in private practice. Why? Because socialized medicine doesn’t pay doctors enough to want to be doctors. As long as they could “opt out” of the socialist system, they would opt out, and the system would fail. So, to keep doctors from abandoning the system, England banned private practice, so they had no choice. Of course, many still found a choice by escaping to America or giving up being doctors. Now England’s facing an acute shortage of doctors.

Given this experience, only a fool would try to repeat that in US, right? Actually, no, plenty of fools are ready to repeat that here. Enter the recent attacks on what is being called “concierge medicine.” “Concierge medicine” is the term used to describe a system where primary care physicians stop trying to see a hundred patients a day and overcharging private insurance patients to subsidize their losses from seeing Medicare patients. Instead, these doctors limit their practice to something like 500 patients a year, each of whom pays a flat fee, something like $1,200 a year (or $100 a month), for the right to see the doctor any time they wish.

This is a great system. Why? Because the doctors are making solid profits that keep them in business. AND they find that by limiting patient numbers, they actually get to know their patients, they get to spend time with them, and they get to offer them dramatically improved health care. AND they don’t have to deal with the stress of seeing a hundred patients a day just to break even under Medicare’s horrible pay structure. AND, patients love this system.

I belonged to one of these a couple years ago and it was great. For a flat monthly fee ($60 a month), I could go to the doctor any day (or every day) without an appointment. The only time I ever had to pay more was if I had to see a specialist. The doctor spent anywhere from 20-40 minutes with me depending on the issue. The doctor and his staff were unbelievably helpful and they wanted to find anything possibly wrong with me and fix it, even if it wasn’t the issue that brought me in, because preventive care kept their costs down. So I saved a ton of money, the doctor made his money, I got healthier and everyone was happy.

Who could object to this? Socialists.

A full court press is just starting to attack these plans. Their reasoning is pure socialism: so long as we allow these doctors to set up their practices like this, they will have no incentive to participate in the socialist system Obama is setting up. That means people who are stuck in Medicare or Obamacare and who “can’t afford” to pay the “outrageous” fee of around $100 a month (i.e. one cable bill) will be relegated to the crappy system that Obamacare has created. Thus, we must stop these evil doctors by taking away their right to create a better system, lest they end up destroying the socialist paradise that Obamacare envisions. . . where doctors are overworked and underpaid and treat patients like hamburgers on an assembly line and don’t even know their names.

And don’t think I’m kidding or exaggerating:

● Whined AARP policy director John Rother: “What we are looking at is the prospect of a more explicitly tiered system where people with money have a different kind of insurance relationship than most of the middle class, and where Medicare is no longer as universal as we would like it to be.” Right, because choice sucks and because we can’t have unequal pigs. (Don't forget, AARP gets rich pimping Medicare-related insurance.)

● Squealed Glenn Hackbarth, chairman of MedPac (a commission that studied this issue for Medicare): “My worst fear . . . is that this is a harbinger of our approaching a tipping point. There's too much money [for doctors to pass up concierge medicine].” Right, it couldn’t be that Medicare doesn’t pay doctors enough to be doctors, it must be those evil rich people stealing doctors away. Let’s take away their right to protect themselves from our idiocies.

● Fellow MedPac comrade Robert Berenson called concierge medicine a “canary in the coal mine” and said “the lesson is, if we don't attend to what is now a relatively small phenomenon, it's going to blow up.” Yes comrades, stamp out this capitalist horror now before it exposes the insanity of our new system.

What you have here is the ideal system. Doctors are happy. Patients love the plan. It’s cheaper care. It’s better care. So the liberal response is: we must kill it before it exposes the horror that is government-managed health care! That's pretty despicable.

Is it any wonder liberalism always ends with death camps?