4. Government Healthcare: The Medicare Enslavement Web

by admin on 08/12/2019 12:50 AM

The longer a government program is in effect,

the more complicated it becomes.

When the government introduced managed care in an effort to control costs, there were progressive controls on all segments of the medical/healthcare complex. This included doctors, hospitals, health insurance companies, laboratories, imaging facilities (x-rays, scans, CT, MRI, etc., et. al.,) pharmaceuticals, druggists, medical supplies and equipment.

Private insurance, BC-BS and others normally sent out circulars to all their members which usually were 2 to 6 pages in length. These could be read during a physician’s mail break or between patient appointments.

When Medicaid was begun in the 1960s, we received large ring binders of rules and regulations, procedures and obligations. These of course, could not be read during an office mail break or between patients, and were largely topically reviewed or further visually scanned. No one would eliminate several hours of productive patient care to read the ring binder page by page.

There were frequent revisions of these rules and regulations and updates for ring binders was laborious and frequently not read. To send these out to physicians and other providers proved to be a costly endeavor. As the electronic transition occurred, we received CDROMs to keep us up-to-date.

Physicians who had difficulty in finding time to listen to medical tapes and now CDs of medical information, did not budget additional time to read the rules and regulations that would limit them in the care of their patients.

This, however, did not influence the purveyors of government healthcare from continuing to overwhelm us with new rules and regulations which primarily were practice restrictions.

I closed my office when I became a senior citizen at age 80 in 2015. I informed my patients and the managed care organizations. A colleague advised me not to inform Medicare and Medicaid because he had to reapply if he wanted to be paid for the receivables from his active practice.

We experienced a similar situation when we went from a hospital-oriented practice to a strictly office base practice by moving away from being adjacent to the hospital but still in Carmichael with no change in phone numbers. We had to reapply for membership in Medicare and Medicaid if we wanted to be paid. It took three months for our new applications to be accepted.  

Therefore, we felt it would not be financially prudent to notify Medicare and Medicaid for several months until all the past due statements were processed or we might have had to complete a new applications process again. as before which caused us rather significant financial hardship for seven months.

Now, four years later we are still getting updates for Medicare and Medicaid as if we were still in practice even though we have not submitted any claims since 2015.

We are so thankful that we are no longer in practice or subject to the Medicare and Medicaid rules and regulations with their never-ending web.

We shudder to think that at some time in the future all physicians will be in the Medicare-for-all enslavement web, probably without recourse to an alternative practice setting.

https://mises.org/wire/how-government-regulations-made-healthcare-so-expensive

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Government is not the solution to our problem;

government is the problem.

– Ronald Reagan

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