Health Care Reform = Lower quality service for millions.

Now that all the hoopla and excitement over another President reaching the 100 day milestone in the White House is over, Americans better brace themselves for the seismic shifts in Domestic & Foreign Policy that will transform this country from a vibrant Free Market Based economy into a European Style Socialistic Nanny State. One of the first orders of business will be to reform Health Care and give Washington the upper hand in providing low quality health care to millions of Americans. While on the surface the Social & Humanitarian aspect t of providing Health care to those that are currently uninsured (estimated 46 million) is commendable, even if you are here illegally - the truth is that only about half of those 46 million uninsured will be covered under some version of Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) or the new National Health Insurance Plan. Millions of Americans who now have Private Health Insurance will also find themselves in these programs whether they want to be in them or not.. Yet while Barrack Obama may insist that any New Government run Health plan will compete with Private Plans, the insistence on increasing Medicaid enrollment is just not going to make this possible.In other words, don’t expect high quality care from any of these Government run Health care plans whether it be Medicaid or National Health Care.

INCREASED ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE WILL MEAN LOW QUALITY..

Pushing more people into the Medicaid rolls will not translate into Doctors incorporating the overflow of Medicaid recipients into their practices..For years Doctors have been accepting fewer & fewer of these patients because of the low reimbursement rates and all the red-tape that is inherent in these government run programs…Medicaid pays on average only 56% of the cost of medical services provided by these physicians. Waiting to receive their reimbursements can mean waiting anywhere from 37 days to as high as 115 days if you practice medicine in Pennsylvania. Stands to reason then that if Doctors are accepting fewer Medicaid patients but yet the Government insists on increasing enrollment in Medicaid, that this will lead to reduced care for all Medicaid Beneficiaries..

CANCER & CARDIAC CARE

Another reason for concern is the fact that Medicaid Patients commonly receive substandard care as opposed to those covered by Private Health Insurance. This is particularly evident in the areas of Cancer & Cardiac care. Researchers found that Medicaid patients who suf­fered a heart attack were significantly less likely than patients with other forms of insurance to receive a number of important clinical interventions includ­ing cardiac catheterization, percutaneous trans­luminal coronary angioplasty, and revascularization procedures. The authors of the study strongly suggested that the financial disincen­tives of caring for Medicaid patients contributed to the gap in the quality of treatment. Other studies have found a similar disparity in the use of invasive procedures between cardiac patients in Medicaid and those with other types of insurance.
According to a recent study in the Journal Cancer, researchers found that Medicaid patients who were diagnosed with breast, colorectal, or lung cancer had a two-to-three-times greater risk of dying from their disease than patients with other types of insurance. This disparity in outcomes was apparent whether the patients were enrolled in Medicaid before or after their diagnosis of cancer and held up even after controlling for other factors, such as site and stage of the cancer and the gender of the patient.
While some of these failures within the program are ignored by Washington, it is also a fact that Medicaid patients are less likely to be treated by Board certified doctors than those with private insurance. Overall, it is safe to say that while an expansion of health coverage for millions will be portrayed as a noble and just cause by the Biased Mainstream Media, it will in no way guarantee any improvement in the level of service or health status as indicated by a study conducted of low-income Medicaid recipients from 1989-1995..
At a time when this economy is shedding jobs at the rate of 600K a month and Americans are losing their employer based health insurance coverage , this will only add to the uninsured number and will continue to increase the Medicaid & SCHIP rolls. For every 1 point increase in the unemployment rate, it is estimated that 1 million Americans will receive Medicaid for their coverage and an additional 1.1 million will become uninsured. While I agree that Federal and state policymakers need to get serious and address not only the problem of the uninsured, but also how to extend access to quality health care to all Americans. President Obama's proposal would rely on a Medicaid expansion, as well as the creation of a new, as yet unspecified, "gov­ernment-run health care plan" that would compete with private health plans. This policy prescription is both insufficient and counterproductive.

PLAN WILL REQUIRE MASSIVE & INCREASED GVT. SPENDING

For the amount of money that taxpayers will have to dish out over the next 10 years to run this program, I would think that Washington should be offering a stout health plan similar to the ones that our Senators & Congressman receive. Estimates have the government spending about 450 billion a year and about 6 trillion dollars from 2010-2019. The Obama administration will argue that this plan will in fact realize a savings during this same 10 year period if certain events occur. Events such as physicians' being willing to adopt health IT, consumers being willing to accept changes in diet and exercise. … Obama discounts that there is little evidence that there are known methods to cause the "if only' behavior to occur, and to occur quickly on a large enough scale to matter.
This monstrous & massive overhaul of our health care system will inevitably just become another gift from President Obama to Washington Insiders and in the end leave most Americans with even less control of their health care dollars than they do today. Don't take it from me, listen to this report on Canada's National Health care system which is similiar to the model that the US will implement once legislation is passed.

Thanks to Jeet Guram & John S. O'shea M.D. & The Heritage Foundation for some of the contributions and research used in this report.