Getting access to a preferred, in-network doctor is getting harder all the time. Three big stories about access blocks under the Affordable Care Act came out this week. First, the NYT profiles the troubling rise of contract ER doctors. The emergency medicine departments in many hospitals now employ doctors who are out-of-network for a given insurer, even when the ER itself is listed as “in-network” for that same insurer. The result is that even patients who have the ability to choose an ER in an in-network hospital often wind up with out-of-network doctors treating them—and large, unanticipated, out-of-pocket bills as a result:
When legislators in Texas demanded some data from insurers last year, they learned that up to half of the hospitals that participated with UnitedHealthcare, Humana and Blue Cross-Blue Shield — Texas’s three biggest insurers — had no in-network emergency room doctors. Out-of-network payments to emergency room physicians accounted for 40 to 70 percent of the money spent on emergency care at in-network hospitals, researchers with the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin found. […]
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Common sense would indicate that the ACA is in its final twitches, but since we now live in backwards-ass opposite-ville I would think the government will try to fix this by pushing massively for Single-Payer.
This whole country should be revolting in the streets just like the Chicoms, but we’re still too comfortable with our own apathy.
you won’t find it at that bum link etihter
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Fixed – claudia
http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/09/30/under-the-aca-the-doctor-wont-see-you-now/ .
… and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
– Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, 1776
Brought to you by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Supreme Court, and other assorted rat-bastid democrats. Had enough?
But if you are a foreign national with Ebola we just throw open the doors and give you the best medical care available.