Overall I don’t think the specific concern (“if doctors would be required to accept forced-on-us healthcare plans”) would become a huge problem. I know what this argument is getting at though. Medicare doesn’t pay doctors as much as private insurance. If their was a government option, it would pay as much as medicare. Cuts in medicare spending are a constant threat to control costs. “Cuts in medicare spending” translates exactly to paying physicians less for specific services. I’d be a lot more concerned if the government option was still part of the bill.
I’m not sure if private insurance will start paying doctors less if this bill passes. The way I understand it, private insurance companies pay more because of competition. They want patients to buy their insurance; doctors won’t accept insurance that doesn’t pay them well; they pay well so doctors will accept their insurance and patients will buy it. It gets more complicated with insurance through an employer, but that’s the basic idea. Hospitals and doctors accept medicare for a number of reasons. Money is one. A lot of the rest is pure human compassion.
As far as the federal government requiring physicians to accept a specific type of insurance… We doctors pay for our own training, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The government had better pay us back if they want to put such financial limits on how we practice. We’re not government employees. Besides, we have a monopoly on medical know-how. That’s a lot of power. They’d better not try to push us around.
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Raging Kitty