DOCTORS' OPINIONS: What Do Most Physicians Think About Obama Care?
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Making sense of the new health care changes is a challenge that would drive a Philadelphia lawyer to distraction.
There is a reason why many doctors oppose the law, and investment adviser Lance Brofman (www.seekingalpha.com) has a theory:
"The reason that no nation, including the wealthiest can allow markets to set the prices of medical care indefinitely is that demand for medical care is inelastic.
"Demand for a good or service is inelastic if a percentage increase in price results in a smaller percentage decrease in the quantity demanded. Basic economics tells us that sellers facing inelastic demand will continuously raise prices until prices reach the elastic portion of the demand curve.
"Consequently in every developed country in the world, all goods or services with inelastic demand have their prices regulated by government. Medical care in the USA being the only exception...."
Even though the now infamous Dr. Ben Carson says the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) "is the worst thing since slavery," most doctors are planning to participate.
Carson, a neurosurgeon-turned-conservative-activisÂt, said Obamacare is the "worst thing" to happen to America since slavery, because "it is making all of us subservient to the government."
Carson is a 62-year-old native of Detroit who earned his degree from the University of Michigan Medical School. Now retired, Carson was a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics, and the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University. He made national headlines with his inflammatory denunciation of the federal law.
Linking it to slavery has to be an overreach that no one else thought of before, but he sure stoked the fires of controversy already burning brightly around the President's feet.
Since Dr. Carson would deny health coverage to millions of Americans, perhaps President Obama is considering asking him to return the Presidential Medal of Freedom he was awarded in 2008; of course that can't happen because the medal was given by President George W. Bush.
Poll results on the ACA are almost as confusing, perhaps more so, than the law itself.
While 30 percent of doctors said they will participate in ACA, less than half that number, 14 percent, said they will not deal with Obamacare, according to a recent survey. Another 16 percent aren't sure.
Physicians said they saw opportunities to provide care to the uninsured and a medically under-served population, but more than 80 percent of doctors worried about what they will be paid from the plans participating on the exchanges, wrote Bruce Japsen in Forbes.
"Health plans are focused on implementing all of the changes required by the law in the most affordable way possible," said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the trade association and lobby for the health insurance industry.
"One way to help keep coverage more affordable is to offer high-value provider networks, which include contracts with doctors and hospitals that provide the highest-quality, most cost-effective care."
The Obama administration has said such competition has helped premiums be about 16 percent lower than earlier estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
Consumers choose from an average of 53 health plans from the federal marketplace and have a choice of at least two insurance companies.
Of those doctor practices that said they plan to participate in the health insurance products on the exchanges, nearly 60 percent said they are doing so "to remain competitive in our local market."
Another 51 percent said the health law was an "opportunity to replace current charity care as our uninsured patients obtain coverage."
As it has since it was passed, the ACA continues to split the country on partisan lines, with a solid majority of Democrats expressing a favorable view and a large share of Republicans viewing it unfavorably.
The share of Democrats who say they like the law -- which dropped somewhat following the 2012 election and has hovered just below six in ten for most of this year -- appears to have rebounded this month.
Currently, two-thirds (67 percent) of Democrats say they have a favorable view of the law, up from 59 percent last month, and closer to levels measured in 2011 and 2012.
Deep partisan divides on the ACA are nothing new, but this month's Kaiser Health tracking poll also illuminates some differences in intensity of opinion between Republicans who identify with the Tea Party and those who don't. For example, seven in ten Tea Party Republicans say they feel 'very unfavorable' about the law, compared with half of Republicans who don't consider themselves part of the Tea Party.
Similarly, over three-quarters (77 percent) of Tea Party Republicans say they don't like the law and want opponents to keep up their efforts to repeal it or stop it from being implemented, compared with just over half (55 percent) of non-Tea Party Republicans.
Finally, while a large majority (78 percent) of Tea Party Republicans say they approve of defunding as a strategy to stop the law from being implemented, Republicans who don't identify with the Tea Party are more divided (51 percent approve, 44 percent disapprove). ###
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