Once .gov controls healthcare and takes the needed steps to control cost by limiting the pay of medical professionals how many doctors will voluntarily stay in the system?
Today the costs are out of control because a good specialist can pretty well make a fortune charging all the market will bear.
The billing statements from my recent hip replacement are pretty astronomical.
My "insurance" pays 90% of costs, except when they don't. I think I've gotten all the bills by now and I'm out of pocket close to $8K. Which I'm still trying to reconcile with my $5K out of pocket maximums.
I don't know.what the solution is but if the answer is "more government" the wrong question was asked.
Larry makes a good point.
I'm a Vietnam veteran and I get much of my health care through the VA. Some of you are probably aware that the VA has been under fire for excessively long wait times for appointments at VA facilities, so they came up with a program called (IIRC) "Veterans Choice." Under this program, if you can't get an appointment at the VA within (I think) 30 days, you can choose to have them authorize you to go to an outside doctor, and the VA pays for it.
I had an introduction to how that works recently. In December of 2017 I had a bunch of open sores on my lower legs. I called the dermatology department for an appointment, and they told me they didn't have any openings until late February. I needed help right then, so the person in dermatology told me I could go with Veterans Choice, and he gave me a number to call.
It took me a full week of exchanging voicemail messages before I was actually able to talk to someone at the Veterans Choice number. When I finally spoke with a live person, she told me that I was NOT eligible for Veterans Choice because my records at the VA hospital didn't indicate that I had been referred to the Veterans Choice program. I told her that I had most certainly been referred, that it was the dermatology department that gave me the number to call. Her view was that this wasn't a "referral." Apparently, to get a referral over not being able to get an appointment in a timely manner I would first have to get an appointment, and then have the doctor refer me to the Veterans Choice program.
But we're not done yet. I had the personal e-mail of the chief attending doctor in the dermatology department, from a complaint I had filed several years before involving one of their residents. So I e-mailed the doctor, and he brought me in and treated me personally more or less on the sly. It's all in the records, but it wasn't a normal appointment. I came when he was on the floor, and he saw me between consultations with scheduled patients. I mentioned my debacle with Veterans Choice, and he laughed. He said the program was a joke anyway. According to him, at least for dermatology nobody can get an appointment through the Veterans Choice program, because all the private dermatologists are booked solid and they aren't taking new patients. He said IF you could get an appointment, it would be three to six months in the future -- which, of course, obviates the whole point of the program.
And I'm next door to a city with a teaching hospital, so it's not like we have any shortage of physicians in the area. It must be many times worse in regions that don't have large, teaching hospitals to draw doctors from. Most of the residents at the VA hospital are drawn from the medical school. The dermatology doctor I saw is on the faculty there.