Most doctors find Obamacare too hard to swallow

Opinion: May 20, 2013 at 12:00a.m.

By Robert E. MOFFIT

McClatchy-Tribune

WASHINGTON

Among President Obama’s broken promises, there’s this gem of June 15, 2009: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise — if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.”

That promise helped sway the American Medical Association to back the president’s Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. But the AMA endorsement merely reflected a tremendous gap between its Washington lobbyists and the folks they claim to represent.

In 2011, a Jackson & Coker survey found that 70 percent of doctors disagreed with the AMA position supporting the law.

It gets worse. Last year, a Physicians Foundation survey found that as a result of the ACA, physicians were “less positive” about the future of American health care, and more than a third planned to restrict their Medicare or Medicaid practice.

WHAT CARE ACT FORGOT

Doctors are demoralized and feel powerless. Obamacare never addressed physicians’ most pressing concerns — particularly the need for medical tort reform. It completely ignored the already difficult problems physicians face with Medicare payments, which are below market rates.

Worse, the law created the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a bureau charged with cutting Medicare payments even more.

The new law also turned the heavy flow of government red tape into a gusher. A 2012 Physicians Foundation survey found that almost four of every five respondents — 79.2 percent — identified too much regulation and paperwork as a “very important” reason the medical profession is in decline.

In addition to the mountain of paperwork under which they already labor, doctors will be faced with reams of new bureaucratic requirements such as new Medicare rules governing patient referrals and reporting, governing practice standards, plus tougher civil monetary penalties and criminal sanctions.

None of this will make the practice of medicine more attractive.

Even before Obamacare, America faced a shortage of physicians — particularly in geriatrics and primary care. The American Association of Medical Colleges predicts a shortage of 124,000 physicians by 2025. Older doctors will retire, but will they be replaced in sufficient numbers?

PROFESSION LOSES LUSTRE

If you’re a young doctor, finishing four years of medical school after college, plus three or more years of a residency, plus further training through a fellowship, you will start your career with an accumulated debt averaging $150,000 and the prospect of going to bureaucrat obedience school.

Fewer doctors, meanwhile, will accept new Medicare and Medicaid patients. It’s not the patients; it’s the bureaucratic baggage, combined with sub-par reimbursements and inflexible price controls.

Expect even more doctors to abandon private practice, go to work for hospitals or join big group practices. Expect even greater consolidation of health-care markets and less competition.

Real health-care reform would restore the traditional doctor-patient relationship. In such a relationship, physicians would be the key decision-makers in the delivery of care, and patients would be the key decision-makers in the financing of care.

That can’t happen unless and until patients control health-care dollars and decisions, and third-party insurance executives are directly accountable to those who pay the health-care bills. In other words, that can’t happen unless and until Congress repeals and replaces Obamacare.

Robert E. Moffit is a senior fellow with the Center for Policy Innovation at The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.