Scott Gottlieb writes in The Wall Street Journal, The Doctor Won’t See You Now. He’s Clocked Out
ObamaCare is pushing physicians into becoming hospital employees. The results aren’t encouraging. 3/15/13

Excerpts:

ObamaCare’s main vehicle for ending the autonomous, private delivery of medicine is the hospital-owned “accountable care organization.” The idea is to turn doctors into hospital employees and pay them flat rates that uncouple their income from how much care they deliver. (Ending the fee-for-service payment model is supposed to eliminate doctors’ financial incentives to perform extraneous procedures.)The Obama administration also imposes new costs on physicians who remain independent—for example, mandating that all medical offices install expensive information-technology systems.

The result? It is estimated that by next year, about 50% of U.S. doctors will be working for a hospital or hospital-owned health system. A recent survey by the Medical Group Management Association shows a nearly 75% increase in the number of active doctors employed by hospitals or hospital systems since 2000, reflecting a trend that sharply accelerated around the time that ObamaCare was enacted. The biggest shifts are in specialties such as cardiology and oncology.

Once they work for hospitals, physicians change their behavior in two principal ways. Often they see fewer patients and perform fewer timely procedures. Continuity of care also declines, since a physician’s responsibilities end when his shift is over. This means reduced incentives for doctors to cover weekend calls, see patients in the ER, squeeze in an office visit, or take phone calls rather than turfing them to nurses. It also means physicians no longer take the time to give detailed sign-offs as they pass care of patients to other doctors who cover for them on nights, weekends and days off.

HKO

Please read the entire article. This is not an unexpected result from a top down statist solution. Health care, like any other business, is an organic system with interrelated parts that can not accurately be mapped out in a technical flowchart. Just as scientific management proved inadequate to manage dynamic firms this same elitist attitude is grossly inadequate in addressing health care. The small personable family doctor who actually cared about his or her patients is being legislated and regulated out of existence.

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