Tonight I’m speaking at a panel event for medical students at Georgetown University. Titled “The ACA and the Evolution of Our Health Care System,” the event will explore how Obamacare impacts doctors. The event is organized by the American Medical Association’s chapter on campus.
We go to doctors because we want their expert medical judgment on what’s ailing us and how to fix it. In the Wall Street Journal, Zane F. Pollard, a pediatric ophthalmologist, writes about what’s routinely interfering with his ability to exercise his best judgment when it comes to treating his patients: government regulations.
A couple weeks ago I pointed readers of this blog to an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, written by an orthopedic surgeon, Daniel F. Craviotto, who took a stand against growing government control of his livelihood.
In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel F. Craviotto Jr., an orthopedic surgeon, writes eloquently about the government’s increasing intervention in the practice of medicine. He illustrates some of the ways (though there are many more) by which the government has come to increasingly control doctors’ time, efforts and income — i.e., their lives.
In my recent interview with Sally Pipes about Canadian health care, we discussed how Canada succumbed to socialized medicine. According to Ms. Pipes, calls for government-provided health care began in the province of Saskatchewan in the 1940s.
A little-known section of Obamacare called the Physician Payments Sunshine Act will start being enforced this year. The Act treats all doctors who collaborate with the pharmaceutical industry as potential criminals whose private financial affairs must be exposed to the world by government order.
Next year Obamacare will give more than thirty million Americans completely subsidized health care under Medicaid, or mostly subsidized health care under the state exchanges. As the demand for health care will dramatically increase and the supply of medical professionals able to service that demand will remain essentially unchanged, we can expect to experience things like longer wait times for surgery, having to drive further to visit a specialist and even the possibility that no doctor in drivable distance is accepting new patients.
