Once the details of ObamaCare became known, courtesy of Nancy “You have to pass it to see what's in it” Pelosi, the motivation to stay in the profession disappeared. Why would someone spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to become what will in effect be 'medical factory worker'? After all, medical decisions will not be made by doctors but by bureaucrats using spreadsheets and poorly wrought statistics. That's not how to run the medical profession. That's why Dr. Jeffery Singer, MD, is pulling the plug on his private medical practice.
I am a general surgeon with more than three decades in private clinical practice. And I am fed up. Since the late 1970s, I have witnessed remarkable technological revolutions in medicine, from CT scans to robot-assisted surgery. But I have also watched as medicine slowly evolved into the domain of technicians, bookkeepers, and clerks.Under ObamaCare it will get even worse. Whenever you add yet another layer of bureaucracy upon any organization or government entity, its ability to perform its function decreases. The already overregulated and marginally efficient medical industry will become far less efficient even as ObamaCare creates an artificial shortage of medical care, and ration it. And with that rationing will come bureaucratic oversight of every medical decision made for the treatment of patients, something that will do nothing other than decrease the quality and quantity of treatment for everyone. To ask the redundant question, how does this help anyone?
Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.
Government has already exceeded the size limits that govern its effectiveness. As it grows bigger and more intrusive it becomes less able to perform the functions it is supposed to perform. (Everything else is wasteful surplusage that helps no one.) Trying to be all things to all people means it becomes nothing to everyone because they know it isn't capable or competent enough to do so. And so it goes with health care in the US. The government, in a misplaced effort to 'help' people gain access to medical care, will do just the opposite. (Not that it had to help people get access to medical care because they already had access to it well before ObamaCare.)
ObamaCare will take over one-sixth of the entire economy and, in the end, will run it into the ground. And rather than providing adequate health care to all, it will deny it all in the name of “fairness”.