Virginia Democrat Calls For Forcing Doctors To Accept Medicare And Medicaid Patients

You would think that when your party is burying a hole that is getting harder and harder to get out of, you wouldn't want to that hole get deeper faster.  But here is Kathleen Murphy, Democrat running for the House of Delegates against Barbara Comstock, telling a forum in Great Falls that she believes it should law to force doctors to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients.  Forced by government decree, mind you.  A birdie sent me this:

FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.  

She did not recognize that the payments are inadequate to cover the doctors' costs.  She also did not recognize there is a shortage of over 45,000 physicians now and that it is forecast to be 90,000 in a few years.  

Democrats appear to want to make physicians slaves of the state, but Democrats don't admit they would just drive more doctors out of practice into retirement and other occupations.  The Obamacare law and regulations are causing millions of people to lose their health insurance, drop many doctors and hospitals. The HHS internal forecast is 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance due to the Obamacare law and rules about adequacy of insurance.

Many more people will be uninsured.   The penalties for being uninsured start at $95 per year, but the penalties can't be collected by the IRS if a person does not have a tax refund to attach.  

The out of pocket costs required by Obamacare's Silver Plan for a non-smoking mother and father with two children making a gross before income taxes of $50,000 (roughly average salary for VA) would be $13,765 per year including the deductible of $10,400.  That's 28% of their gross income -- not very affordable and about the same as guidelines for a mortgage payment.  For such a family making $100,000 of gross income, The cost would be $21,431 including the deductible of $12,700, or 21% of gross income.   

With such high deductibles doctors are stuck with trying to collect cash from the patients, even at regulated charge structures.  Thus is makes sense for primary care doctors not to participate in Obamacare, medicare and medicaid.  They should encourage patients to participate in Concierge Care and insurance programs run by the doctors themselves with patients who can do simple math.  Patients can take out catastrophic insurance with high deductibles for major surgeries.  Tax deductability for individual medical savings accounts would make health care more affordable.  

The head of Obamacare programs, Berwick, loves the socialized medical system in the UK, but never mentions that malpractice insurance is minimal.  In the UK, panels of doctors review and approve malpractice awards, rather than emotional juries misled by trial lawyers.  Malpractice reform like this with caps on malpractice awards would go a long way in making health care affordable.

I hope physicians rise up and speak out for common sense, protecting quality medical care in the US and giving patients freedom to choose

 

THIS along with the fact that Terry McAuliffe has already said he'd go to the government shutdown mat to get a state exchange in Virginia.  Unbelievable.  Combine the chaos of thousands of people across Virginia losing their health insurance, we are going to add to that on the state level by forcing doctors to accept patients they can't afford to help?  Unbelievable.  Dark days are ahead, but there is still time.    Three days to make sure this does not happen.  

Democrats in Virginia will drive up health care costs, drive doctors out of the state, and then drive health care costs up even more because there will not be enough doctors practicing in the state.  

Vote Cuccinelli.

Comments

[isophorone]

Wait! I know this one! Directive 10-289, right?

[Lori Jeanne Eck]

You have got to be kidding me!

[bewolff]

Freedom is being lost,democrats are turning into gestapo types and not the American way,what next a firing squad if you don't do as Obama commands ?

[Stevenlaststraw]

The one and only goal of Dem/Progressive/Statists has always been Socialized Medicine-- Whether they call it 'single payer (sic)', 'Medicare for all', Medicaid for all', etc., makes no difference. It is why they are demonizing insurers, and soon, doctors. Lenin said it was the main pillar of the communist state-- that hasn't changed. We are seeing the reemergence of the elite/royal system of govt-- what is so puzzling is why so many are so willing to bow to it for a morsel of bread.

[Les Jackson]

Too bad that we don't have a law to force politicians in DC to do what the people want!

[Redheart]

The Republicans ended Slavery. The Democrats are re-instating Slavery.

[Earl P. Holt III]

The TRUE motive of the hard left (some prefer "Democrats") in enacting "ObamaCare" was to ensure that loyal constituencies of their party would be certain to get free health care they could NEVER afford on their own, and to make the rest of us pay for it.

Those "constituencies" include queers with AIDS, I.V. drug-users with AIDS, nigros with AIDS and illegal aliens.

This was their "hustle"...

[plus.google.com/116943798864588061494]

"You would think that when your party is burying a hole".... please please please fix the lede. HTF do you bury a hole...

[David Powell]

What they don't get is that this is not Cuba.

More to the point, the more skilled someone is, or the more resources one has, the more able they are to simply get up and move, whether it is to another location where there are less hassles or simply to another profession, in the "Atlas Shrugged" vein.

Unless the right of a worker to simply quit is taken away, and in a nation where there is freedom to travel, good luck with that, the market will have to have some impact on what they are paid.

Law may ignore realities but they are still realities. Wile E. Coyote can keep running after he's gone off the cliff, but it just gets worse the farther he goes!

[Mike Jefferson]

By forcing someone to accept an arbitrary compensation for work performed is by definition "involuntary servitude". This is illegal under the Constitution and is backed up by significant legal precedent. It's time to take back our country.