Patient-Centered Medicine and the Struggle to Survive Obamacare

"As we near some sort of attempt at compromise regarding the future of Obamacare, you will hear from health care workers that we need to bring the focus of medicine back on the patients.  The past few years, in which there has been a well-intentioned desire to control costs through bureaucratically oriented goals, the role of doctors and nurses has morphed away from patient care.  They have found that their role as “documenter of services rendered” through electronic medical records and coding for billing purposes has significantly taken away time spent with patients.

The other disconcerting, and also easily predictable, result of this bureaucratic mess is that it will sort out hospitals based on relative cost.  As anyone with any elementary skills at logic could foresee, this will result in hospitals turning away those who are very sick, trying to “dump” them on other hospitals.  Consequently, hospitals will expend significant effort trying to attract doctors who treat relatively well patients with illnesses that are easily treatable.  Those doctors who have very sick patients will settle into those default “dumping ground” hospitals.

Eventually, the financially viable hospitals will be in the areas in which healthier people live, and the dumping-ground hospitals will have to be subsidized by the government in order to survive.  Not only that, but doctors who choose to treat the sickest patients who are most at risk for complication will actually be penalized, because their costs are outside of the norm."

[American Thinker]