The Unintended Consequences Begin
President Barack Obama keeps telling Americans that he is creating jobs, or at least he is trying to create jobs. His greatest achievement, Obamacare, is blossoming like poison ivy in the Spring, spreading it's tendrils in every direction. The result is a rapid increase in lost jobs and livelihood for healthcare workers and more.
One example of unintended consequences is a five hospital medical system (name and location withheld for obvious reasons) that laid off over 100 nurses in the past few weeks. Since the layoffs, there have been six deaths due to errors:
Three transfusions of the wrong blood.
One surgery on the wrong site.
One telemetry device shut off while the operator went to lunch.
One death due to wrong meds.
Were the deaths the result of fewer employees? Less qualified employees? Over tired employees? We don't really know the answer, but it does beg the questions.
The lengthy legislation and the torrent of regulations, which includes electronic medical record systems at health care facilities is supposed to be safer, reduce costs. How's that working out for you?
University of Mississippi Medical Center just laid off 115 of their workers and are not filling another 90 positions in an attempt to save $12 million annually. Don't get excited when you see see the word save, because the hospital must spend $80 million over the next five years to install the electronic health care records to comply with a federal mandate.
As Hot Air points out:
The Nassau University Medical Center in New York is also laying off workers. They aren’t just investing in the new electronic records requirements, but eying the fact that Obamacare will be reducing their Medicare reimbursement each year going forward as their legacy public worker pension costs continue to rise.
Warner Todd Huston thinks he smells a rat in all this.
Last week, layoffs were announced in Mississippi at the University of Mississippi Medical Center due in part to the 80 million dollars that it will cost to implement a new computer system named EPIC Systems, Obama’s newly mandated electronic medical records system.
Naturally, the system Obama is forcing on an entire nation of medical professionals and hospitals is the same system owned and operated by Judith Faulkner, one of his own big donors. Faulkner is also a big donor to the Democrat Party. Not surprisingly, besides affording her the lucrative, crony capitalist business deal, Obama also put Faulkner in a key role on the Health Information Technology Policy Committee, the committee responsible for implementing the President’s e-records policy. She has become known as Obama’s medical records czar.
As hospitals and doctors are forced to launch their own EPIC Systems portals, the costs are forcing hard choices for administrators. All to implement what many call a flawed system.
There's more from Warner Todd Houston on doctor reimbursements and the electronic system (video here):
Rep. Price revealed to an audience at a recent Heritage Foundation event that Obama’s new electronic medical records system is filled with “nonsense.”
One of the things about the system Price told the audience was that the system requires a pathologist to fill in a field of information on what a patient is allergic to in every case the docs deal with. If they do not fill in this field the system will “ding” the doctor on his reimbursement funds. That may not seem so absurd, but Price also noted that the pathologist has to fill out these same fields even if he is just consulting on a case by looking at a slide in a microscope and won’t actually see the patient in person.
It gets worse. Price went on to recount that this system is so dysfunctional that it requires the same fields to be filled out for a corpse at an autopsy.
Which brings us to the doctors. Many doctors are losing money, taking out loans to pay their own staff, going broke, or even closing up their private practice offices for good. Heaven forbid the Left-wing media that props up Obama should report this fact, they blame the doctors, not the government.
What about all those waivers that were promised? 88% of waivers go to labor unions. Curt at Flopping Aces says "There is no way anyone can argue that the ObamaCare waiver process isn’t benefiting Obama’s crony’s and supporters". Obamacare Waiver Tally: 543,812 for Union Members, 69,813 for Private Employees.
Under Barack Obama's plans for the military, approximately 500,000 or more military will be out of a job soon as Obama is proposing a pay raise for civilian federal workers in his new budget. With unemployment what it is already (8.5% or the real 11.5%, or the 15.% some people figure), is it possible for those military to find jobs? If not what will they do for insurance? What kind of treatment will they receive?
We can thank Barack Obama (and wife Michelle) along with the boot-licking Liberals like Nancy Pelosi (who after her $10,000 a night Hawaiian vacation claimed that the Obamacare repeal bill alone would “destroy more than 300,000 jobs,”), for the biggest disaster to healthcare in American history.
A Yahoo News article says Health spending stabilized as a share of the nation's economy in 2010 ... grew by 3.9 percent in 2010, reaching $2.6 trillion, ... an average of $8,402 per person, according to the report by the Health and Human Services department. I suppose the 2011 number are not out yet. Notice the following:
Experts debated whether it's a fleeting consequence of the sluggish economy, or a real sign that cost controls by private employers and government at all levels are starting to work. [snip]
The nonpartisan number crunchers at HHS found that the health care law barely contributed to cost increases in 2010 — just one-tenth of 1 percentage point. Major provisions expanding coverage to more than 30 million uninsured don't take effect until 2014, well after the presidential election.
The federal government's share of the total health care tab — another issue in this year's political debate — grew to 29 percent in 2010, up from 23 percent as recently as 2007. .Counting state and local spending, the overall government share stood at 45 percent of the total
The article also states that 'Spending on doctor visits and related care — about 20 percent of the total — grew at a historically low rate of 2.5 percent,'.
We must ask whether the low rate of spendong on doctor visits is a result of fewer people actually seeing physicians or whether it is simply government's refusal to actually pay/reimburse physicians for the work they have already done, for the lives they have already saved?
One thing is darned sure: We have only seen the tip of the unintended consequences iceberg when it comes to Obamacare. I fear it will get really ugly if Obamacare cannot be repealed.
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