Academic

Medicare cuts and the future of healthcare following ObamaCare?

By Tung Yin

Over at the Faculty Lounge, Sharona Hoffman reflects on how her elderly relative died of a cancer that her doctor failed to detect despite the fact that the tumor was egg-sized and visible to the naked eye:

However, when listening to her heart, her doctor never paid enough attention to see the egg-sized tumor that was clearly visible to the naked eye right beneath the heart area and never took the time to ask her whether there was anything else that was of concern to her.  My elderly relative told me that she always felt the doctor wanted to end the visit right away, and she never felt it was appropriate to bother him with any additional questions.  Thus,  the tumor was not discovered until it grew completely out of control and was a stage 4 cancer.

96 is a long life, but the tragedy is that the woman's life was still cut shorter than it necessarily needed to have been, if the doctor had had more time to diagnose the tumor.

Given that one of the ways in which ObamaCare purports to reduce health care costs is by imposing reductions in fees paid to doctors who accept Medicare, one wonders whether this sort of story -- "she always felt the doctor wanted to end the visit right away" -- will become even more commonplace.  I don't mean that in the sense that doctors will spend less time on patients to "get back" at Medicare, but rather than economic pressures will require that the reduction in per patient income be made up with a higher volume of patients, and hence less time per patient.

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on March 10, 2011 (boomark / email).