My husband’s employer had to freeze pay rates and omit bonuses this year.  At the same time, the cost of insurance went up.  His employer absorbed the majority of the cost increase, but employees had to take a hit, as well.  Given the rising cost of food and gasoline, our family is definitely trying to make do with less.

But not 32% less, along with less pleasant working conditions in which my husband is expected to perform the exact same job.

On the other hand… hey, doctors are rich, so let’s stick it to them! From Heritage:

She’s not alone. A group known as Docs4PatientCare, led by Dr. Hal Scherz, has brought together doctors across America to make the case for repealing Obamacare.

I realize that to some people, especially government employees math is hard. But healthcare is not now and has never been, anywhere in the world, FREE. It’s just a question of deciding who bears the cost for it. Some people are demanding that doctors do so.  It’s only fair, they reason, that people so privileged as doctors be required to give back, besides, it’s immoral to make a profit off sick people.

They never seem to wonder exactly with what these doctors are privileged.  Crushing education debt?  Long hours?  Incredibly high malpractice premiums?  The right to have your name ruined by some yahoo looking for a quick buck when he sues you?  The right to have a jury easily swayed by a convincing attorney award him the value of years worth of your labor?

Give back? That’s based on the theory they took something away from people in the first place.  What did they take? No one seems to know.

But ask yourself – would you work hard and bear heavy responsibility without being well-compensated for it?  At some point, wouldn’t you decide that if you’re going to be paid less anyway, you’d rather take an easier job? I would.

Doctors are already voting with their feet in Massachusetts, which has suffered under an Obamacare-type plan for several years.  Sure, everyone is covered by insurance.  But good luck finding a doctor.

Fifty-six percent of Massachusetts internal medicine physicians no longer are accepting new patients, according to a 2009 physician work-force study conducted by the Massachusetts Medical Society. For new patients who do get an appointment with a primary-care doctor, the average waiting time is 44 days, the Medical Society found.

And that’s not just in Massachusetts.

The House of Representatives will soon vote on repealing Obamacare, but the vote is largely symbolic because there’s little chance Harry Reid will permit it come to a vote in the Senate. Even if it did pass a Senate vote, President Obama would surely veto it. Obama promised that if we like our plan, if we like our doctor, we can keep them.  I do like my doctor and I want to keep her.  That’s why I’m doing my part to keep the heat on Congress to repeal Obamacare, and failing that, chip away at it and refuse to fund it.  In other words, to stop giving her reasons to quit.

Crossposted.

My first question is whether somebody is actually paying Rosie “fire doesn’t melt steel” O’Donnell to do a radio show.   Seriously?  But I guess as long as Keith Olbermann remains employed, nothing should surprise me.

The best part about this is this tool still thinks her “free” healthcare is wonderful.

“Living in Canada, we have universal health care, which is wonderful, but I have been on a waiting list [garbled] seven years… I’ve been waiting seven years just to meet the surgeon. …To see any kind of specialist is at least a few months, you’re not going to get into see somebody next week. … But I think actually what I did was maybe piss somebody off. …They’re telling me it’s going to be another two or three years.”

I really enjoy how blithely accepting she is of the concept that health care in her country may be distributed according to how well the patient sucks up to bureaucrats.  If you “piss somebody off” you should be prepared to wait longer to see a doctor.  How again is Canada’s health care “universal” when it can be delayed or denied at the whim of some civil servant?

Brian Maloney wonders,

Just as a conservative is often said to be a liberal who is mugged, has one of our favorite “progressives” just had a similar epiphany?

Rosie has never let facts stand in the way of her opinion before, and it seems unlikely she’ll permit them to now.

It drives me wild to go to the doctor and be compelled to wait two or three hours.  My husband has expressed his displeasure by ordering pizza delivered to the waiting room.  Complain to the office manager and she blames the doctor who in turn blames the office manager.  So would I pay a few hundred bucks a year for this?  You bet I would.

Patient dissatisfaction with long waits is not lost on physicians, and new practice models are popping up around the country partly in response.

On its Web site, One Medical Group, a practice with five offices in San Francisco and a newly opened one in New York City, promises “same-day appointments and longer, more personalized visits that start on time.”

How does the medical group guarantee on-time appointments? The practice, which charges patients a $199 annual membership fee to join and uses information technology to help manage costs, doesn’t require that patients come in for routine ailments like urinary tract infections. Instead, the medical professionals treat them by e-mail or phone, similar to a new service in Minnesota we wrote about earlier this year. Refills are also done online. Such policies help limit the number of patients coming into the office.

In addition, the practice has adopted certain time management policies that make starting and ending appointments on time easier, said Tom Lee, medical director of One Medical Group. Because appointment times with doctors are 20 to 30 minutes for each appointment,  longer than elsewhere, they don’t tend to run over as often. This also builds in extra buffer time between One Medical appointments for physicians to deal with tasks like looking over test results or filling out forms.

Email or phone treatment of common-sense ailments alone makes membership well worth the price.  This is a great example of how the market can work in medical treatment – without government intervention.

Conservatives were outraged by the chicanery of separating physician payment increases from the health care reform (that’s three lies for the price of one) bill Congress recently rammed through.  The “doc fix” was separate legislation so that physician payments could be increased without adding to the total cost of the main bill, so that Democrats could dishonestly claim the bill reduced the deficit.  Now, however, we are seeing the real “doc fix.”

Some Idaho orthopedists grew weary of the low reimbursement rates the government gave them for caring for worker’s comp patients.  So they got together and agreed not to treat those patients anymore.  They hoped that their boycott would force the Idaho Industrial Commission to increase the fee schedule – their payments.  While they were at it, they decided to stop working with Blue Cross of Idaho – also a notorious underpayer – until a better deal could be negotiated.  Unions behave this way all the time, and it’s often very effective.

In a similar case in Colorado last February, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and charged the doctors with price-fixing.

The FTC charged Roaring Fork Valley Physicians I.P.A., Inc., which represents about 80 percent of the doctors in Garfield County, Colorado, with violating the FTC Act by orchestrating agreements among its members to set higher prices for medical services and to refuse to deal with insurers that did not meet its demands for higher rates.

Those doctors lost, and if they want to continue to work as physicians, they will do so at the prices set by the government.

Now the Obama administration has stepped it up a notch. The FTC only deals with civil complaints. In order to deal with the Idaho orthopedists, Obama sent in Eric Holder and the Justice Department, which is at liberty to file criminal charges.  You see, those Idaho orthopedists collectively agreeing that they had enough and weren’t going to take it anymore, were actually engaged in two antitrust conspiracies.

… the Justice Department has unambiguously stated that refusal to accept government price controls is a form of illegal “price fixing.”

The FTC has hinted at this when it’s said physicians must accept Medicare-based reimbursement schedules from insurance companies. But the DOJ has gone the final step and said, “Government prices are market prices,” in the form of the Idaho Industrial Commission’s fee schedule.

The Sherman Act, which is being used here against physicians, exempts trade unions.  Obama may have one boot on BP’s neck, but the other seems pretty firmly planted on that of America’s doctors.

h/t to Dr. Wes, who writes,

Given the 21% cut to Medicare payments that occurred today (but CMS is ‘holding claims’ for ten days to allow for another stop-gap measure to be implemented), ask yourself two questions: (1) “Where was the AMA?” and (2) Are you ready to be a government employee?”