I just got an alert on my phone that the whitehouse says the healthcare website is now working.

Glad that is over with!!!!! Phew!!!!

I didn't read the article and don't intend to. My points still stand. Why can't you understand things for yourself?

I don't need an article to explain to me why some doctors take medicaid and some don't. The anecdotal articles about doctors saying they are doing x, y and z are nearly worthless. Most doctors couldn't tell you anything about what insurance they accept. They have no idea.

Ikes you tricked me.

Here is what I am getting from the article:

1) one specialist who treats medicaid patients said there is no room to expand to add more.

2) another doctor who treats a lot of medicaid patients says they will likely only be able to grow their medicaid patient base by 15%

3) 57% of all doctors in California take medicaid patients

4) medicaid payments are issues that heavily involve individual states.

5) A healthcare company who treats medicaid patients in California and nine other states has just hired two thousand new employees.

6) some of the 600k new medicaid patients in California have ALREADY been assigned primary care physicians.

7) one opthamologist could not get one patient into see a specialist until February from some unknown beginning date.

8) one other lady has to wait to see a specialist.

A few questions for you Ike: 1) Did you read past the title of the article because it does not seem so? Waiting times for specialists is and has been a common issue for everyone regardless of their level of insurance. Again a lot of it depends on where you live as specialists are not evenly spread out through the population. So in some areas seeing a neurologist might be easy and in others a rheumologist might be easy.

As I knew without reading the article though, was it consisted of a handful of anecdotal stories and a bunch of data that actually runs counter to the article's intent. In other words it was crap. Yet you are swinging it around like some sort of holy grail.

It's all anecdotal! Except for the published study showing 43% of doctors don't take medicaid in california (And that's a ****ing huge number btw that is much higher among specialists) and that number is 31% nationwide.

Anecdote anecdote anecdote though.

lol

so expanding availability is bad because doctors haven't already begun taking medicaid, though they can (and will). doctors who don't take medicaid now don't have to in the future, they just have to deal with the transparency in pricing and insurance providers forced to complete with medicaid on the supply side.

lol wut?

oh hai ikestoys! keep ****ing that chicken!

you just said that doctors haven't already begun taking medicaid, a program in effect since the 60s

What percentage of people are on medicaid in California. That well more than half the doctors take medicaid patients is not a bad thing like you and the lolbad ny times writer seem to think.

Plus nobody addresses the reality that with medicaid expansion it will cause doctors to reevaluate if they take medicaid patients. I will bet a nickle that this leads to an increased percentage of California doctors accepting medicaid patients.

Thanks for noting 69% of all doctors in the country take medicaid patients. That is much, much higher than I would have guessed.

\ No You

What are you basing your contention that it's not a problem? Because I'd love to see what criteria you're using other than a reflexive obama reach around.

With single payer we would no longer need private insurers.

They'd still be there tho.

yes capitalism has shown itself to be very effective in the healthcare industry lolol

edit - yeah, it's damn effective if you're an insurer or provider. Really damn effective.

Yah, socialised medicine is terrible for numbers of doctors. The UK's practically devoid of them and Australia is a doctor wasteland. Oh, wait. We have about 75% more of them per capita than the US. How is that possible?

View Jon Stossel. Single payer is better than the U.S. system. But it is also broken. Just less broken.

We need passive government involvement. We don't want govt to completely take over all of healthcare. Govt is not good at micromanagement. Party in charge always gives exemptions to their friends.

Oh, who is claiming socialized medicine is the reason for the doctor shortage?

Anyways, if you want to pay attention, the united states government's policies along with the AMA have caused a doctor shortage in the US.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_perce...ers_of_the_AMA
This source says only 29% of doctors are members of the AMA.

You seem to be claiming that socialising it will diminish numbers. The opposite happened when we did. You're not alone. I've seen this argument elsewhere in the rightwingnutosphere: if it's not an easy route to making multi-millions, no one will want to do it and smart people will all become investment bankers instead. But people are complex and motivated in different ways, which I recognise is hard for rightists to understand, given that you guys measure everything in dollars.

No I'm not. You're simply falling back to your own stereotypes instead of actually reading.

The problem with 'socializing' (or obamacare) medicine in america's scenario is that you are increasing demand for medical services while doing little to nothing to increase the amount of available doctors. Therefore you have less doctors per patient.

And?

We need at least one PCP per 1,000 persons under our current system. 40 million new participants means we need 40,000 more doctors. Have seen it estimated that in fewer than 50% of doctor visits was a doctor actually needed. Need to allow more PAs and nurse practitioners to be the first line of healthcare. That is the only way to save money. We need an entirely new health care model.

So propose ways to increase the number of doctors. And no, abolish the AMA probably isn't what we're looking for.

Abolish the AMA? What? You might want to know what something is before you talk about it.

Anyways, I've gone over this before. Working within the parameters of our current system we need to open new medical schools, increase the size of our current medical schools and increase the number of residency slots.

Ikes is actually right here(well, half-right... the government isn't really causing a doctor shortage): the AMA behaves like a cartel.

You can feel some pity for individual doctors for some bad PPACA outcomes, but pitying the medical establishment is silly; there is a reason the AMA has opposed every healthcare reform initiative since the 1940s (including Medicare and Medicaid)--it threatens the lucrative cartel they've set up by introducing more competitive pricing. So what looks to some people like a bug of health reform--doctors facing lower reimbursements--is actually a feature, and one that consumers should be happy about.