Health Insurance // Current

Half of Primary Care Doctors Would Leave Medicine if Possible

This is why our health care costs skyrocket and we are spending so much money on health care without getting the quality results of every nation. We do not focus on prevention. People have a mindset of who needs a primary care doctor? I'll just wait until I'm sick...Therefore, insurance companies do not reimburse primary care doctors as much and it is a shame.

"Nearly half the respondents in a survey of U.S. primary care physicians said that they would seriously consider getting out of the medical business within the next three years if they had an alternative.

The survey, released this week by the Physicians' Foundation, which promotes better doctor-patient relationships, sought to find the reasons for an identified exodus among family doctors and internists, widely known as the backbone of the health industry.

A U.S. shortage of 35,000 to 40,000 primary care physicians by 2025 was predicted at last week's American Medical Association annual meeting.

In the survey, the foundation sent questionnaires to more than 270,000 primary care doctors and more than 50,000 specialists nationwide.

Of the 12,000 respondents, 49 percent said they'd consider leaving medicine. Many said they are overwhelmed with their practices, not because they have too many patients, but because there's too much red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.

And if that many physicians stopped practicing, that could be devastating to the health care industry. Video Dr. Gupta: Watch more on the looming doctor dearth »

"We couldn't survive that," says Dr. Walker Ray, vice president of the Physicians Foundation. "We are only producing in this country a thousand to two thousand primary doctors to replace them. Medical students are not choosing primary care."

Dr. Alan Pocinki has been practicing medicine for 17 years. He began his career around the same time insurance companies were turning to the PPO and HMO models. So he was a little shocked when he began spending more time on paperwork than patients and found he was running a small business, instead of a practice. He says it's frustrating.

'I had no business training, as far as how to run a business, or how to evaluate different plans,' Pocinki says. "It was a whole brave new world and I had to sort of learn on the fly.' "This is why our health care costs skyrocket and we are spending so much money on health care without getting the quality results... more

dmambo5
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2 hours ago

HR 676 Passes!

New York Times article (dated July 4th, 2009) talking about the potential passage of Dennis Kucinich and John Conyer's bill... more

asherp
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9 responses

1 day ago

We need Universal Health Care not Health Insurance

the author brilliantly describes the difference between the two, for he watched his fiancee be 'repeatedly denied coverage by... more

matea
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2 days ago

General Motors cuts healthcare for retirees

Note to retirees: Don't count on your retiree health insurance from your company. Even if you have the agreement in writing, many retiree health insurance agreements include clauses giving the company the right to modify, suspend, revoke, terminate, or change the program at any time. And for many employers, that time has come.

General Motors plans to eliminate retiree healthcare coverage for approximately 100,000 white-collar retirees at the end of this year. Former factory workers, however, have union contracts that prevent the company from revoking coverage.

To help these retirees pay for their new coverage, GM is raising monthly pension payments by $300, the New York Times reports, which typically means $240 or $255 after taxes. Yes, there is always Medicare for retirees over age 65. But the extra $3,600 annually from GM, or perhaps $108,000 if a retiree collects that amount over 30 years, may or may not cover the lifetime out-of-pocket costs that Medicare recipients face. Retirement researchers estimate that a retired couple will need between $205,932 (Boston College Center for Retirement Research estimate) and $225,000 (Fidelity Investments estimate) to cover healthcare costs in retirement. And the Employee Benefit Research Institute says a couple will need a staggeringly high $635,000 to be almost completely sure of having enough money to cover all health bills beyond what Medicare covers, not even including the cost of long-term care.

GM is the latest in a string of companies--including Ford and Chrysler--to cut healthcare coverage for retirees. Companies that aren't cutting retiree health benefits completely may increase premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Kodak, for example, plans to shift health insurance costs to retirees over the next 10 years and phase out employer-paid coverage for dependents completely. The camera company also plans to cut dental coverage and life insurance for retirees beginning next year.

Given the ambiguous language that many retiree health insurance agreements are written in, many former employees will have little choice but to deal with the increased expenses. The U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a government agency that insures private-sector pension plans and pays benefits to workers if a plan fails, does not insure health insurance benefits. Some Kodak retirees have taken to picketing outside the company's headquarters to protest the benefit cuts. So far, no additional changes to the retirement plan have been made public.

it is just unfair to people that have worked hard and are now trying to enjoy the last part of their lives... bad form GM!Note to retirees: Don't count on your retiree health insurance from your company. Even if you have the agreement in writing,... more

Crazyotto
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6 days ago

Assisted suicide: Washington legalizes, doctors rebel

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DeliaTheArtist
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10 days ago

Dr. Dave

Dave Ores pays $700-a-month for low income housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, owns two Harleys, and has a tattoo of a... more

BrianMcD
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29 days ago

Health insurance costs outpace wages

Workers' health insurance premiums have shot up more than five times faster than their wages since 2000, adding to an increasingly tight squeeze on family budgets, according to a report released Thursday by a health care consumer group.

The report shows that the average cost of family coverage in the workplace went from $6,672 in 2000 to $12,078 in 2007. That's more than a 78% rise. But at the same time, average wages rose about 15%, according to Families USA, a left-leaning advocacy group.

"People who used to take health care coverage for granted no longer can do so, and they are at growing risk of joining the ranks of the uninsured or underinsured," says Ron Pollack, the group's president.

As health costs rise, employers around the country are moving to save money by cutting back benefits or scaling down their share of premium costs. Still, most Americans still get their health coverage through an employer or the workplace of a family member.

The gap between wages and health costs varies widely between states, Pollack says. But here are some highlights:

* Michigan had the biggest gap. Health insurance premiums rose more than 17 times faster than workers' average earnings between 2000 and 2007.
* Nevada had the narrowest gap. Overall, premiums rose 2.5 times as fast as wages.
* Wyoming workers saw the biggest premium increase in the nation. Premiums rose nearly 130% over the eight years of the study.

Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, an insurance industry trade group, says one reason insurance costs are rising: "There is overuse, underuse, and misuse of health care services."

Zirekelbach also notes: "There are a lot of new and expensive technologies that are being used without proof of which ones work best and which ones are cost-effective.

Other studies show that the growth in private insurance premiums has slowed in recent years. Premiums rose just 5% in 2007, much more slowly than the nearly 14% rise as recently as 2003, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

But Pollack says his group's study shows that workers are facing a "triple whammy." Overall premiums are rising, while workers' shares of those premiums are going up, too. At the same time, the added pressure on employers is forcing them to hold back on wages, he says.

Nearly half of the respondents in a poll released by the Kaiser Foundation earlier this week said they'd skipped some needed medical care because of cost. More than a third said they'd postponed needed treatment, and about a quarter said they'd divided pills, skipped doses, or skipped filling a prescription because of the price.

"People's budgets are being strained in multiple ways these days, and health care is no exception," says Mollyann Brodie, a vice president and director of public opinion and survey research at Kaiser." Workers' health insurance premiums have shot up more than five times faster than their wages since 2000, adding to an... more

DeliaTheArtist
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25 days ago

Uninsured Not Main Reason for ER Crowding

"Contrary to what many believe, people without medical insurance are not the primary cause of the overcrowding that is typical in emergency rooms at US hospitals, new research indicates.

"There is a commonly held belief that uninsured patients abuse the emergency department, coming in for 'non-urgent' complaints, are overwhelming the system. This is simply not true," lead author Dr. Manya F. Newton told Reuters Health.

On the other hand, the assumption that increasing numbers of uninsured patients are being seen in ERs is, in fact, true, according to the report in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association.

Crowding in the ER is due to many things, including an increased amount of ER use by everyone, fewer emergency departments, and fewer inpatient beds, Newton explained. "People without insurance tend to use the emergency department less than any other group, and when they present they tend to be sicker."

Newton, a researcher with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, pointed out that this study is the first "to critically examine unsupported statements" about uninsured patients in the emergency department that appear in medical articles.

Newton's team identified 127 studies that looked at the medical and surgical care of uninsured adult patients in emergency settings. Assumptions identified in these studies were then tested against validated data.

Overall, 53 studies had one or more assumptions about uninsured ER patients, according to the report.

The assumptions that increasing numbers of uninsured patients are going to emergency departments and that uninsured patients lack access to primary care were both found to be accurate. Likewise, the belief that treatment in the emergency department is more expensive than office-based care for both uninsured and insured patients was also true.

Unsupported assumptions include the beliefs that uninsured patients are the main cause of emergency department overcrowding, that uninsured patients have less acute conditions than insured patients, and that uninsured patients use the ER mostly for convenience.""Contrary to what many believe, people without medical insurance are not the primary cause of the overcrowding that is... more