WASHINGTON — There's enough controversy surrounding health care reform. Editor Shawn Tully of Fortune magazine recently added one more to the pot: A potential lack of doctors to take care of the patients who will now have health coverage.
In a recent article, Tully explained that while ACA increases health-care coverage, it will also freeze "the ranks of the already-busy providers needed to furnish all those extra check-ups, cancer screenings and angioplasties: Americans physicians."
Tully interviewed University of Pennsylvania oncologist Dr. Richard Cooper, who explained that simple supply and demand is at work here. Expanding demand and cutting fees, which is what the ACA is about, means doctors will take the higher-paying patients and ignore the lower-paying ones.
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This, on top of a huge decrease in primary care physicians (not to mention a decrease in residency slots thanks to already in-existence doctor freezes), means longer waiting times to see the doctor. In effect, Tully said, health care reform will ensure everyone is covered by insurance, all right. But it's playing with how effectively the health care will actually be delivered.
"Much of the pain would be avoided if we simply agreed to expand the number of doctors to meet the growing demands of the medical market place," Tully wrote. But proposals in Congress directed toward this fact haven't gone anywhere, mainly because the Obama administration believes that restricting the number of physicians holds down costs.
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