Obamacare: A Hard Pill to Swallow for Physicians
Kathryn Nix /
The negative effects of Obamacare will impact every American. However, it is those who are the very backbone of the United States’ high-quality health care system who will be most severely affected: physicians. In a recent paper, Heritage’s health policy expert Robert Moffit, Ph.D., details the changes American doctors can expect to see in the way they practice medicine as a result of the recently-passed law.
Moffit outlines the following as being most detrimental to the practice of medicine:
Medicaid Expansion and Payment. As it is, doctors receive heavily reduced pay for treating Medicare patients, and reimbursement for Medicaid is even lower. In many areas, doctors who accept Medicaid do so at their own loss, as reimbursement rates do not even cover the expense of seeing the patient. Writes Moffit, “Medicare payment
has resulted in sporadic access problems for Medicare patients, and the lower Medicaid payments have already contributed to serious access problems for low-income persons and worsened hospital emergency room overcrowding.” By adding an estimated 18 million people to this system, Obamacare will aggravate these existing dilemmas.