| | | >> All I know for sure is that my health care hasn't changed one bit.
Yeah, well, you may not think it has. That doesn't mean it hasn't changed. Only that the changes are imperceptible to you.
In some clinics it is now almost impossible to see a doctor without first seeing a midlevel provider (a nurse, more often than not) who makes an initial determination as to whether you "need" to see a doctor.
If you lived in West Memphis Arkansas or in dozens of other "rural" areas, you would find that you no longer have access to a local hospital or emergency department, because they have closed their doors, out of business, broke. If you live in West Memphis and you have a little midnight allergic reaction, you'll be traveling to The Med in Memphis, or somewhere else. You wouldn't have noticed that being in the Bay Area, but in Cowtown, USA, it matters.
And in my town, where the Sisters of Mercy have run one of the hospitals on a charity basis since 1912 (my mom actually did her RN training there in the late 1930s), you would find that hospital has now been sold to CHI St. Vincent, still charitable, but maybe a little less so ;)
My doctor, a fine physician, jumped on board (actually was pushed by the stimulus and the ACA) on the electronic medical records fiasco. God, he looked tired last year. But it is okay, because this year, he has hired a "scribe" -- a girl who follows him around putting everything he says and does into the computer. Efficiency, indeed. I've put in a good number of these systems -- in every instance with me urging my customer to reconsider. And in no case has affected efficiency in a positive way. Operationally, a typical small clinic goes from 3 to 7 employees just to accommodate the EHR system. Worse, the federal invasion and bureaucracy is astounding. I'm still seeing crap I absolutely cannot believe in the new "meaningful use" standards.
If you were a Medicaid patient you would have noticed longer waiting lines, in some cases a totally inability to find a provider and you would have ended up -- you guessed it -- going to the ER for non-emergent treatments. In my state, one full quadrant of the state in which I work has not a single OB/GYN seeing new Medicaid patients. I suspect the same is true in other areas of the state with which I am less familiar. It is a crisis for those seeking prenatal care. You're not hearing much about that from the Obama administration though, are you?
My point is, health care has changed, and it has changed as a direct result of the ACA. Maybe you haven't seen it but believe me those changes are happening and they are NOT improvements. I deal with this stuff daily and the problems are serious and I don't believe they're going away anytime soon. |
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