Obama's Crank Yankers Call to Harass Your Doc

If you're wondering why the telephone line is busy at your doctor's office, it might be because one of Obama's people is wasting everyone's time.

In the near future, pranksters from the Obama administration will be jamming the lines at doctors' offices with thousands of fake requests. The goal is to find out if your doctor gives preferential treatment to patients with private insurance:

In the mystery shopper survey, administration officials said, a federal contractor will call the offices of 4,185 doctors — 465 in each of nine states: Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. The doctors will include pediatricians and obstetrician-gynecologists.

The calls are to begin in a few months, with preliminary results from the survey expected next spring. Each office will be called at least twice — by a person who supposedly has private insurance and by someone who supposedly has public insurance.

What "supposedly" means is that this is all a big fat ruse. Obama's friends will be calling from Chicago, but the doctors' offices won't know that:

To make sure they are not detected, secret shoppers will hide their telephone numbers by blocking caller ID information.

One of the purported objectives of the survey is to punish Obama's enemies address the increasingly severe shortage of primary care doctors:

[The survey] will also try to discover whether doctors are accepting patients with private insurance while turning away those in government health programs that pay lower reimbursement rates.

But we already know the answer to this question:

Medicaid, the program for low-income people, pays so little that many doctors refuse to accept Medicaid patients. This could become a more serious problem in 2014, when [ObamaCare] will greatly expand eligibility for Medicaid.

And as Pat Austin notes, we already know where the biggest physician shortages are.

How much do you want to bet that the O-bots conducting this survey will make shocking discoveries about health care disparities in which women, the poor and minorities are the hardest hit?

If you have qualms about Obama's "snoopy survey," take comfort in knowing that Big O is simply supersizing one of Dubya's initiatives (supposedly):

Federal officials said the initial survey would cost $347,370... The White House defended the survey, saying a similar technique had been used on a smaller scale in President George W. Bush’s administration.

No one knows how well this will work, but if all goes as planned, this could become a powerful new tool for government intrusion into the private sector:

Jennifer Benz, a research scientist at the center, said one purpose of the study was to determine whether the use of mystery shoppers would be a feasible way to track access to primary care in the future.

Why stop with primary care? Soon every business could be getting calls from Uncle Sam.

Synopsis...

Are we supposed to be surprised when they find out that people who are stuck with cheap, crappy, government-managed health programs wait longer for non-urgent health care services?

While we’re on this theme, how about some mystery lobbyists at the White House? Send them to congress too. Send in some mystery billionaire donors while you’re at it. Then get some mystery constituents into congressional offices.

Let’s collect some data!

I'm sure someone like James O'Keefe would be happy to help out with a project like that.