09.02.08
Scott Gottlieb Gets It Right on Obama Healthcare
Today's Wall Street Journal has commentary from Dr. Scott Gottlieb on the Obama healthcare plan I have been blogging about. He notes how successful Federally Qualified Health clinics have been in Chicago.
"those clinics have been hampered by state and federal regulations that try to promote "fairness" in our health-care system, only to undermine simple, local efforts aimed at genuine reform.
First among these regulations are mandates that require clinics to offer certain health-care services. In many cases a particular mandate can be defended. But the accumulated total makes it harder for some bare-bones clinics to offer any services at all."
As discussed previously, Mr. Obama wants to pull patients from private type insurance into a similarly federally mandated program.
As I have been ranting it is about access to care not insurance or registering in a federal program. Dr. Gottlieb agrees and adds to our reasons why access is the problem:
One big challenge is attracting and retaining skilled medical professionals. Pay is low, and the risks to providers high. Here, Sen. Obama's plan is no help. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the Obama plan will cost about $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Give or take a handful of billions, funding his plan will eventually mean the same cuts to providers working under programs like Medicare and Medicaid that were used to subsidize other big health-care expansions.
Finally, the Federally Qualified clinics even had built in immunity much like the docs in the military, but recently even some of this protection has been taken away. Certainly, the Democrats do not support tort reform, so what else is there to attract good docs to such a program.
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