
If ObamaCare becomes a reality, it will fail miserably. Here's why:
When (and if) the Democrats force their health care agenda down our throats, tens of millions of people will have access to a glorious new entitlement — and doctors' offices and emergency rooms will be flooded. A doctor from Massachusetts describes what happened after health care reform was implemented there: "'We were hammered with patients who didn't have insurance before but now had it,' she says. Many of them showed up after years of medical neglect with either 'pesky little problems' or 'big tumors, high blood pressure, or very scary lab findings.'"
Now that the Democrats run the country, cost is a secondary concern. The Federal Government will borrow or print whatever money we need to pay for the new goodies. Fine…problem solved. But what about the human resources? You can't borrow surgeons or print respiratory therapists. Have the democrats thought about that?
When Massachusetts created an estimated 432,000 newly insured residents in less than two years, Massachusetts' glut of doctors quickly became a critical shortage. More than 41% of primary care practices in the state did not accept new patients in 2008, up from 28% in 2006, according to a survey by the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS).
Meanwhile, wait times for new-patient appointments rose from four weeks in 2006 to nearly eight weeks in 2008 for general internal medicine, according to the MMS. Nationally, average wait time is slightly under three weeks, according to the physician placement firm Merritt Hawkins & Associates.
"Universal coverage does not mean universal access," says Bruce Auerbach, MD, an emergency physician in Attleboro, immediate past president of the MMS, and an advocate of universal care. "Once you get 100% of the people covered, you want to be sure you actually have people to take care of them."
Painkillers don't prescribe themselves, pacemakers don't implant themselves, hips don't replace themselves, dying patients don't code themselves, and as BHO has infamously pointed out, gangrenous diabetic feet don't amputate themselves. Moreover, you can throw a stack of $100 bills at a woman who needs a c-section, but unless you can find an obstetrician to do the required job, you still have a very big problem on your hands.
So here's my question for Dr. Obama: We know that the financial resources for health care reform would come from new taxes, but with tens of millions of newly insured Americans, where will the requisite HUMAN resources (e.g., nurses, doctors, administrators) come from?
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Update:
From a Physician who supports universal health care: We don’t have enough doctors for ObamaCare
"The prospect of suddenly adding tens of millions of patients to an overburdened primary care system has the potential to make the already dire state of American health care even worse."