According to Dr. John Noseworthy, President and CEO of the Mayo Clinic:
Obamacare does nothing to link doctors' fees to their performance and reduce health-care costs, the head of the Mayo Clinic told CNBC on Friday.
From the tone of the article, I get the sense that Dr. Noseworthy would be content with a single payer system, but that system won't do anything to control costs either. Ever heard of "the doc fix?"
For the past decade, Congress has passed a series of patches to prevent doctors who treat Medicare patients from seeing their reimbursements drastically cut. Each time, lawmakers grumble and talk about getting something permanent in place so they can end this detested exercise. And every year, they wait until the last minute and hastily patch it, only to repeat the routine.
The way government typically seeks to reduce Medicare costs is to stiff the doctors. As a result triple the number of doctors abandoned Medicare in 2012 as in prior years.
CMS said 9,539 physicians who had accepted Medicare opted out of the program in 2012, up from 3,700 in 2009. Some 685,000 doctors were enrolled as participating physicians last year, said CMS, which has never released annual opt-out figures before.
Since this is not going to change under ObamaCare — at least it won't according to Dr. Noseworthy — we can expect greater shortages of doctors and services, especially for elderly patients and especially with regard to end-of-life care.
The administration also cited research by Dr. Stacy M. Fischer, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who found that “end-of-life discussions between doctor and patient help ensure that one gets the care one wants.” In this sense, Dr. Fischer said, such consultations “protect patient autonomy.”
Opponents said the Obama administration was bringing back a procedure that could be used to justify the premature withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from people with severe illnesses and disabilities.
Section 1233 of the bill passed by the House in November 2009 — but not included in the final legislation — allowed Medicare to pay for consultations about advance care planning every five years. In contrast, the new rule allows annual discussions as part of the wellness visit.
Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, which describes itself as “a pro-life Christian educational ministry,” said she was concerned that end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death.
“The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Ms. Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”
Democrats ridiculed the notion of "death panels" which they "reasoned" away by claiming that this end-of-life counseling has nothing to do with death panels. Why the very idea is ridiculous. Except that the death panel argument is really about ObamaCare's IPAB, Independent Payment Advisory Board.
For instance, one program that is up for debate is Medicare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB. IPAB was created in 2010 following the implementation of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and is a fifteen-member Government agency tasked with reducing Medicare costs while retaining quality of care.
The debate over IPAB has been fierce, and both Republicans and a number of prominent Democrats have come out against the panel. However, despite this, President Obama, in making his requests for the 2014 budget, has proposed that the Independent Payment Advisory Board’s authority only be increased.
If we’re trying to pass a budget, we want to make sure that we’re funding programs that work–and IBAP unequivocally doesn’t.
IPAB takes the Medicare decision-making process away from doctors and away from Americans’ elected representatives in Congress and gives it to an unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable advisory board. This panel is flawed and unethical–but it has total authority to make decisions regarding Medicare funding, how to implement spending cuts within the Medicare program, and how to allocate medical services.
Further, IPAB jeopardizes the quality of medical treatments and services for Medicare beneficiaries: proponents of IPAB argue that the program will improve care by reducing costs, but in reality, by advising such reduced spending per capita, IPAB can actually result in the denial of certain medical treatments, limiting services for seniors and Americans with disabilities.
With nothing in ObamaCare that will drive costs down, the solution will be refusal to pay. Obama and the Democrats repeatedly promised that nobody is going to be denied treatment. And we can keep our health insurance policies too, if we like them.