Health Care Thread

Well at least they fixed the site

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Nine million new people on medicaid no new doctors added to medicaid system to treat them.

This is why Communist countries were never able to feed themselves.

How many doctors should Medicaid have on staff?

Did tad ever respond, Big Picasso?

Medicaid does certainly have some number of new doctors, hyperbole much?

(We constantly get new practice listings here in MD, and its Medicaid isn't rare to see listed...)

PS Many HMOs actually SHRUNK last year, where's that outrage?

It's too bad we're running out of doctors.

"Greatest Country on Earth!" yet can't manage to give it's population healthcare.

Hopefully we can import more East-Asians to doctor for us since we seem too lazy/greedy/stupid to do it ourselves.

Grim1_sl said:

Medicaid Growth Could Aggravate Doctor Shortage - NYTimes.com

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Which reinforces that it's SLOWING not that there's NO NEW DOCTORS BEING ADDED per his statement.

A net loss is not the same as "no new doctors being added".

Yes, his statement was overblown. But yours also tended to overlook the problem. The amount of doctors entering the system willing to take medicare patients isn't enough to keep up with demand, that was always a serious issue. With the new rules it is exponentially worse.

Is it fixable? Probably. But those fixes will not happen with the current rules in place.

Right now the deficit isn't THAT bad, 60% of doctors take Medicaid right now in the worst states. "Normal insurance" runs around 75%. (Medicare which often gets brought up as "shrinking" is at 85% recently - it used to be around 90% (which is the same as the "no new patients no matter what insurance" rate of doctors at 10% - effectively 100%) though in the late 90s - still better than "standard insurance" however for doctors accepting even today)

I was "forced" to use Medicaid briefly between losing my COBRA coverage and Medicare and I personally didn't even once have a problem finding a doctor to use it in that ~18 months.

TL;DR: 80% as many doctor's take it compared to standard insurance, which is a pretty nice amount for something the end user pays nothing for. I usually expect a harsher dropoff for "free" versions of things myself. This whole idea that people should get filet mignon when they're paying for chuck confuses me.

Tell that to the person who can't get treatment. Your excuse that it "isn't that bad" is exactly the one the Republicans used to defend the old system before ObamaCare.

If you can't make things better then stop making them worse. I am amazed at your ability to sound like the people you hate most.

Lets stop defending bad practice and actually start being honest about the issues and the fixes needed.

That issue is one that is shared with EVERY insurance though - every insurance isn't usable at every doctor. That fix would be something that literally EVERY insurance policy would need if you want it to happen. If Medicaid is going to have every doctor accept it, than we need to make sure all the private insurances are 100% accepted too.

But then what about doctor's that feel they have too many patients? We can't force them to take on more than they want, can we?

It's a tightrope walk between the ends if we don't go single payer. Again another reason why single payer would make more goddamn sense.

Vaclav_sl said:

Which reinforces that it's SLOWING not that there's NO NEW DOCTORS BEING ADDED per his statement.

A net loss is not the same as "no new doctors being added".

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Ok nine million people added to medicaid with a net decline in doctors to treat them.

That's +9.00.0000 on one side and a net negative on the otherside.

If you don't understand that the above equals clusterfuck of epic proportions I don't no how to explain it to you because you simply don't seem to understand basic math..

So clearly the problem is trying to give healthcare to people, we should stop treating people and there will be plenty of doctors to go around! Oh, I know! Doctors should be exclusive for people who make over $500,000 a year! That way we'll have more than enough doctors for them!

Though the death of millions of poor people will fix things as well. The solution to most Republican policies.

Maybe we should let republicans cut education spending like they want, that should help with more doctors.

fanaskin_sl said:

let's collectivize the debt so no person remains untouched by a clusterfuck, but keep that profit private.

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That would only work if it is sunny, so the ducks can be free.

Zhaun_sl said:

So clearly the problem is trying to give healthcare to people, we should stop treating people and there will be plenty of doctors to go around! Oh, I know! Doctors should be exclusive for people who make over $500,000 a year! That way we'll have more than enough doctors for them!

Though the death of millions of poor people will fix things as well. The solution to most Republican policies.

Click to expand...

The problem is that there are not enough doctors to treat everyone needed. And there are not enough coming up the ranks to solve the issue. Blaming one side or the other for a systemic problem is nonproductive.

So what is your solution? Are you going to force doctors at gunpoint to do your bidding? Doctors are people too. They expect to get paid for their effort and all the sacrifices they made during their incredibley long (and expensive) time in school. If you dont' have a solution to compensating people for their work then you are just making things worse.

The days of easy fixes are long past. Now we get to do the ugly, hard, slow fix.