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| Economy |
| The bus is full |
| 2009-05-27 |
| Massachusetts took a stab at universal care by requiring every resident to buy health insurance, with the state subsidizing the premiums. The annual cost of Commonwealth Care, originally pegged at $245 million, will be $1.3 billion this year. Consequently, the state's health-care costs have spiked 42 percent in three years, and today, health- care spending is 33 percent above the national average. Now The Boston Globe reports that even though Massachusetts has more doctors per capita than any state, waiting periods to see medical specialists for routine care have grown, again because of Commonwealth Care. The average wait for a specialist now is 50 days; for a family doctor, it's 63, while the average woman who thinks she's pregnant doesn't get to see an obstetrician-gynecologist until her second trimester. But for the busiest physicians, the wait can be as much as a year, simply because narcissistic socialist politicians fancied themselves better qualified to run the state's heath-care system than people with many years of training and experience. And despite the enormous effort and expense, Massachusetts still has failed to achieve universal coverage. The longer waits, of course, are the consequence of hundreds of thousands of newly insured residents descending on the health-care system. As Dr. Gene Lindsey, president of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates of Boston describes it: "We had a bus that was pretty full, and then we invited more people on the bus. Now people are standing in the aisles." For 50, 63, sometimes 365 days. More ominously, the independent consultants whose recent report quantified the longer waits said the development "may signal what could happen nationally in the event that access to health care is expanded" via Obamacare. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #12 "Maybe a vote for government health care could be a vote for right to life." No...somehow I suspect that if you want an abortion you will go the the head of the line. |
| Posted by: Kelly 2009-05-27 18:00 |
| #11 The short bus is not only full and overloaded with straphangers, but there is a crowd on the roof. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-05-27 15:58 |
| #10 ...narcissistic socialist politicians fancied themselves better qualified to run the state's heath-care system than people with many years of training and experience. I don't think I'd classify Mitt as a "narcissistic socialist politician". I would classify him as a first class panderer. Usually towards people that do him absolutely no good. And in this state, anything the government gets it's hands on just becomes another patronage haven with a motto of "don't kill the job". Quality and cost be damned. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2009-05-27 13:03 |
| #9 I'm not sure everyone is going to think this is a bad thing because lots of people who weren't getting health care are now getting it. Have to be careful with these numbers. Plenty of these people had access to some kind of coverage before and switched. You do raise a good point, however. From the socialist point of view the situation has improved if *everyone* now has coverage, even if overall quality of coverage goes way, way down. |
| Posted by: Iblis 2009-05-27 12:43 |
| #8 And we definitely don't need any more Pakis. |
| Posted by: Hellfish 2009-05-27 12:29 |
| #7 "The longer waits, of course, are the consequence of hundreds of thousands of newly insured residents descending on the health-care system. " I'm not sure everyone is going to think this is a bad thing because lots of people who weren't getting health care are now getting it. One point that needs clarification is whether now that everyone is insured, are emergency room visits down because people aren't using them for primary care providers. Also,instead of importing pakistani docs, we could use physician assistants for primary care doctors. You don't need an M.D. for most things. |
| Posted by: Penguin 2009-05-27 10:17 |
| #6 Ed is exactly right. In order to make BambiCare work, we will need many, many more primary care doctors. We don't have enough American-trained docs who want to do that, and our medical school output is capped (about 15K per year). We will be importing doctors from abroad to meet the need. Not only does that create problems for us, it creates problems for the countries from which we import said doctors, since it strips them of their best and brightest. It's another form of imperialism. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-05-27 09:39 |
| #5 Can mass importation of Pakistani doctors be far behind? |
| Posted by: ed 2009-05-27 07:44 |
| #4 No, for true emergencies, like a heart attack, an unexpected pregnancy that needs to be terminated, and so on, there will be no waiting. /sarcasm |
| Posted by: Rambler in Virginia 2009-05-27 07:41 |
| #3 You forget Richard that Obama is a strong supporter of Infanticide. He voted twice that babies who somehow survived their mother's (and her Doctor's) attempt to murder them should be left to die. So you can see that even after waiting a year to see an abortionist - they will still have their rights not to be bothered with a child protected. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2009-05-27 01:17 |
| #2 Its a shame most will never hear about the utter failure "Romneycare" has become. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-05-27 01:10 |
| #1 Let's see now, if it take a year to see a popular abortion doctor about a man-caused pregency termination ... Maybe a vote for government health care could be a vote for right to life. |
| Posted by: Richard of Oregon 2009-05-27 00:14 |