Obamacare Might Not Let You Keep Your Doctor

How many times have we heard, over the last three and a half years, that one of the primary and most popular features of Obamacare is that no one could be denied coverage for a preexisting condition?

The Affordable Care Act does indeed specify, in Section 1201, that “a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage.” In other words, a health plan cannot deny enrollment, or the plan’s benefits, to someone based on that person’s preexisting condition.

However, that is not the same as saying that a plan has to enable a patient to continue the same course of treatment that they started before obtaining coverage in an exchange plan on January 1, 2014.

Key to understanding this distinction is that having “health coverage” is not the same as actually obtaining “health care.” The insurance plan has to take anyone who wants to enroll, regardless of their health status or health history – but they don’t have to provide the same treatments, the same doctors, or the same medications that a patient has been receiving.

Via: Forbes

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Family Doctor: I Want to Take Care of My Patients

As a family doctor, I have always believed in treating the whole person.

Every person is a unique individual, and you can’t cookie-cutter medical care; it’s individualized. I am concerned about health care under the new law, and my patients are very concerned.

Medicine has changed so much in my lifetime. My father had two kinds of patients in the 1950s and 1960s: those who paid in cash, and those he did charity work for. Back in those days, hospitals were not run by huge consolidated corporations – they were run by churches and charity organizations.

We can’t go back to those long-gone days of charity hospitals. And today, one part of living well often involves private health insurance—as long as government regulators don’t interferewith the individualized care that other doctors and I are providing. People having choices is a very important part of medical care.

In the past three decades, I have seen health care become more and more regulated by government. Of the 15 employees I hire, five of their jobs are completely devoted to filling out insurance forms and government paperwork. All that administrative work can detract from time spent on patient care.

It makes it difficult to take care of the whole person—body, mind, and spirit—if you don’t have an environment where you are free to do that. The biggest problem with Obamacare is that there are going to be layers and layers of government bureaucracy that will try to tell me how to treat patients I’ve helped for over 25 years. More federal control is the foundation of it.

Via: The Foundry

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