Doctors Hate ObamaCare? No News To IBD Readers
Investor's Business Daily
Posted 07/10/2012 06:51 PM ET
http://news.investors.com/article/617686/201207101851/doctor-discontent-with-obamacare-known-long-ago.htm
ObamaCare: News that 83% of U.S. physicians have thought about quitting over the president's health care takeover isn't as newsy as it seems. IBD revealed doctors' widespread discontent years ago.
Remember the sea of white coats in the Rose Garden back in October 2009, as "doctors from across the country" (as the White House described them) supposedly rushed to President Obama's side to support his health care reform plan?
The plan that was then making its way through Congress amounted to a radical transformation of health care that people liked less the more they found out about it.
"These doctors know what needs to be fixed about our health care system," Obama claimed then. "And they know that health insurance reform ... will go a long way towards making patients healthier and doctors and nurses to be able to perform . .. those tasks that are so important to them and led them into medicine in the first place."
It turns out, as the New York Times reported, that "the group that supplied many of the doctors for the Rose Garden event, Doctors for America, is a nonprofit organization that grew out of Doctors for Obama, which worked to help elect the president. But it also appears to be working closely with Organizing for America, Mr. Obama's political organization."
Now comes a new survey of 699 doctors randomly selected nationwide, commissioned by the nonpartisan Doctor Patient Medical Association, which finds MDs' attitudes toward ObamaCare to be altogether different.
A stunning 83% of physicians, answering by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, are thinking about quitting their profession, and 65% say government involvement is most to blame for current health care problems.
Some 72% say the ObamaCare mandate requiring Americans to buy insurance won't result in improved access to care, while 49% of respondents say they'll stop accepting Medicaid patients. And 74% warn they will stop taking Medicare patients, or leave Medicare completely.
As to solutions, 70% of the doctors polled say reducing government involvement is the single best fix.
If you're feeling some deja vu, that's because the month before the president's shameless Rose Garden photo op in 2009, an IBD/TIPP Poll of 1,376 practicing physicians chosen randomly throughout the country found, among many other red flags, that 45% of doctors "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if ObamaCare became law.
For such prescience we were, at the time, skewered by the left-wing, George Soros-financed Media Matters, which charged that the poll was "not scientific."
The well-heeled activist outfit cited as authority statistician Nate Silver, a self-described "supporter of Barack Obama" and "rational progressive," which is an ideology Silver describes as "far left" on all but "a handful of issues," that "tends to view conservatism as immoral" and seeks "not reform but transformation."
Far from being unscientific, the IBD/TIPP Poll, America's most accurate in both the 2008 and 2004 presidential elections, was way ahead of the curve in discerning American doctors' grim diagnosis of the reform Obama wanted.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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