Tag: ACA

How (And Why) Obamacare Is Killing People

To begin with, it’s a Marxist idea and very few ideologies in history have killed more people than Marxism.

Specifically, this is what is happening.

I’m old enough to remember when health insurance was affordable. It wasn’t all that long ago; it was before Obamacare passed. Despite being officially called the Affordable Care Act, nothing about it has made health insurance more affordable. The question is, for the higher premiums and larger deductibles we have, are we even getting better coverage? The answer, which shouldn’t shock you, is a big fat “no.”

That’s right, despite paying more, you are also getting less. Health insurance denials and delays have hit record highs, and while many point the finger at insurance companies, accusing them of prioritizing profits over care, they’re not to blame. As Betsy McCaughey points out, the real culprits are the politicians who sold us Obamacare on a pile of lies.

“In 2013, before Affordable Care Act regulations kicked in, insurers denied roughly 1.5% of claims, according to the American Medical Association,” McCaughey points out. “But under ACA rules, denials increased tenfold. Now nearly 15% of claims are denied,” and some insurers are denying a third or more of claims.

Doctors and patients aren’t just battling denials — they’re also tangled in a bureaucratic nightmare of preauthorizations. As McCaughey notes, these delays force doctors to get insurer approval before providing care. And here’s the kicker: the person giving the green light is often unqualified to make those decisions. The AMA warns that an OB-GYN might be the one overriding your neurosurgeon’s recommended treatment.

And the consequences can be deadly. 

McCaughey cites the example of a doctor who had a patient with metastatic breast cancer who needed a specific drug combination. But thanks to prior authorization delays, she had to settle for standard chemotherapy, which failed, and the patient died.

Obamacare is killing people.

It’s not just anecdotes. A House Committee on Energy and Commerce investigation found that Cigna overturned 80% of its Medicare Advantage preapproval denials upon appeal, proving that legitimate care is being withheld. And, as McCaughey reports, Cigna’s algorithm, PxDx, denies authorizations in bulk without considering individual cases.

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If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. That and everything else that came out of his mouth was an effing lie.

Obamacare Is Still Ruining Your Doctor Visits

Here’s an important segment of the social engineering component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed under the Obama presidency:

The ACA provides a strong emphasis on preventive medicine and primary care through insurance reform, increased reimbursement for primary care providers, funding to educate these providers, and incentives to attract providers into primary care. The Nurse Practitioners (NPs) are especially well prepared to educate providers on the use of evidence-based preventive care and to assist the U.S. healthcare system in its transformation toward this model.

In other words, under the rubric of preventative medicine, millions of people who might not have gone to see a doctor prior to ACA are being encouraged to go.  To meet the cost of those millions of new patients, new institutions like urgent care centers are springing up.  Physicians’ Assistants (P.A.s) and Nurse Practitioners (N.P.s) are being used to treat these people as well as more serious cases.  The medical schools do not turn out enough M.D.s to treat the 30 million people (new “patients”) who are being channeled into the American health care system.  As my primary care doctor (an M.D.) told me, there is increasing pressure on him to have a practice of only very sick people.  He frankly told me that he does not want the stress of treating only the very sick all day, every day.

So, in the post-ACA morass, we have too many people going to see M.D.s who don’t need an M.D.  We have too many very sick people that have to wait a very long time to get an appointment with an M.D.  And…we have increasing numbers of P.A.s and N.P.s supervising the care of very sick people.  With millions of dollars pouring into the health care system from the federal government, it becomes a boon to hospital income to have less qualified personnel who need to be paid less than M.D.s.  It’s a morass depicting itself as “needed reform.”  From the Hippocratic Oath to do the least harm, the health care world has shifted to the “principle” see the most people and diminishing the quality of health care.  There is a trade-off between the numbers served, which increases, and the quality of care and professionalism, which decreases.

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