Barack Obama made it clear with his medical plans that, “If you like your current plan, you will be able to keep it.” If you remember hearing your parents grumbling about healthcare policies, I’m sure you heard this phrase. Likely coupled with “if you like your doctor, you can keep them.” For some voters in this country, this healthcare plan sounded amazing. If you’re an average citizen, just trying to get health coverage, knowing that poorer income Medicare patients are given much less access to care is a very large problem, especially for college students. However, if you’re a physician, likely still paying off debt from medical school, the higher implementation of patients to Medicaid will cause headaches. Physicians treating patients on Medicaid are paid 56 percent of the normal treatment payment. The over-under, however, is that keeping your doctor and your plan is not the truth.
When Donald Trump was first elected, he made a promise to repeal President Obama’s medical care program, appropriately dubbed “Obamacare.” This has not been completed, yet many physicians are hopeful it eventually will be.
Investors.com in 2016 found that many physicians are dropping out of the Affordable Care Act, due to decrease in wages. Doctors are also complaining about the amount of “red-tape” surrounding their practice. Physicians, with this implementation, have to appeal to the insurance companies that now insure their patients; rather than focusing their care on the patients themselves.
As a medical scribe in the Emergency Department, the ratio of time spent taking care of patients and tailoring to the insurance companies is severely skewed. I spend a lot of my time making sure the specific words and phrases are documented to save physicians from a lawsuit. The physicians themselves are absorbed with avoiding lawsuits.
For the physicians I work with and those in my family, Medicaid and Obamacare is detrimental to their incomes and the level of care applied to their patients. The amount of insurance input into the doctor’s day-to-day care severely diminishes the quality given to each patient.
Obamacare also greatly affects physician income. While having a medical degree usually affords you a great income, the little “MD” at the end of one’s name also comes with, on average, $300,000. Those with student debt are required to begin paying this debt as soon as they finish their last year of schooling, be it undergrad or graduate.
Medical degree recipients often go into a residency once they finish their degree. While residency pays around 50,000-70,000 per year, this is nothing in comparison to the various debts accrued in their education. The Affordable Care Act greatly decreases the physicians pay. This also greatly affects a doctor’s ability to pay these debts and move on with their lives.
Obamacare is bad for physicians. By proxy, the poor effect on physicians is directly related to the inability to appropriately care for their patients. Red tape and insurance interference makes medical care a government property. Medicine should be done for the patient, not at their expense.