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

[Adjoran]

Is it not odd that Democrats go berserk at the thought of lawyers' compensation being limited in any way by tort reform that would benefit the economy but have no compunction at penalizing doctors to suit their accounting problems?

We already seeing a shortage of new family care physicians ("general practicioners") largely because of the increasing paperwork burdens on those frontline doctors, and that doesn't take PPACA into account. It's as if Democrats are on a mission to hurt American health care as much as they can, as fast as they can.

[P. J. Leary]

I thought indentured servitude was outlawed by the Virginia House of Burgesses long before the Declaration of Independence and Presidernt Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation but Democrats never seem to learn from reading our history. If this would ever be enacted expect an Exodus of M.D.s.

[D]

when doctors close up shop and there is a major shortage..we will be in a heap full of trouble..IT wont matter who has insurance, if there is nobody practicing medicine. Unless Sebelius thinks she's qualified

[Inmemoryof Yossi]

Well DUH! The answer is so simple. Force doctors to accept Medicare and Medicaid, and for the government to PAY the correct costs, dollar for dollar. They can just print more money to cover the cost of the doctor visits.

[Livfreeordi]

I'm a physician. As stated below, "Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”........In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s a minor character, a brain surgeon named Dr. Hendricks, who refused to practice under a socialized medicine. This excerpt (reprinted in “For the New Intellectual”) explains why Dr. Hendricks decided to shrug:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

[Paul Frohlich]

One of the reason why I left communist Czechoslovakia the socialized healthcare, where you are no more yourself your body belong to the state, you are a machine a doctor is the mechanic all ruled by some elites above.But I discovered that America is not as perfect regarding doctors and what they did to you man in the last 100 years. When you were born did you agree that something can be cut of from your body because the doctors indoctrinated your parents. God made an "error" on your reproductive? No you could not consent and your body was violated on in a way even the communist or Nazi would not do. The future police state was on the march in America. Human being is a strange creature, it can be indoctrinated in to any dumb thing. The election of Obama a guy with a deep hate for you America, just to many things to go in to, this place is really in deep trouble.

[NoNameWorks]

But remember -- the DC politicians, including the court and the executive branch are exempt from Obamacare.

And what kind of insurance does state delegate candidate Ms. Murphy have? When the employers have to start approved coverage wonder how much she'll be paying? Bet she has no idea.

[sizegenetics uk]

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[ErnieLane@verizon.net]

This is scary. But it's easy to demagogue, and the Democrats will do it. I don't know if McConnell and Boehner have the cojones to resist.

[Robert April]

Why not ask the candidate herself, either on her web page, Twitter, or Facebook page? I see no evidence that other Democrats are calling for this. But I do suggest asking big name Democrats if they support this.

http://kathleenmurphyfordelegate.com/