Bloodthirsty Liberal ? Health Insurance = Health Care?

No it does not.

This is interesting, because I have tried to explain it to liberal friends, and gotten exactly nowhere. Health care is not the same thing as health insurance. (My own view is that if you live in a major metropolitan area that is reasonably healthy economically, you can get great health care. If you live in a poor area or a very rural area, all the money in the world can?t buy it.)

At the heart of the multi-headed abominable creature known as Affordable Care Act aka ObamaCare, there resides a singular deceit. It is too easy for lawyers and even U.S. Supreme Court Justices to miss this deceit in the process of arguing abstractions, but I and other doctors experience this reality every day our offices:

Insurance does not equal care. One patient?s needs can get in the way of another?s needs. My waiting room is like so many others in America, and when it is clogged with several patients with low-paying highly-regulated insurance, the waiting time goes up and the access to quality medical care goes down.

With all due respect to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, though it is true that everyone will get sick and need health care eventually, it is not true that health insurance automatically provides you with that care.

I can tell you as a practicing physician that the regulations and restrictions and red tape of health insurance (all increasing under ObamaCare) hamstring my office staff and interfere with my ability to take care of you.

What does provide an uninsured patient access to health care are laws that mandate that a hospital emergency room can?t turn you away when you are sick.

A false premise of ObamaCare is that mandating insurance for all somehow enables the ERs take care of all comers. In fact, studies show that Medicaid patients are much more likely to use the ER unnecessarily than are the uninsured. This clogs the ER and interferes with life-saving treatments for other patients.

He continues trying to explain and it is all very reasonable. Unfortunately, it falls on deaf ears. No one listens to anyone else.

Personal story: I knew a guy who bet me that health care could not be found for two of his co-workers who were middle-aged, African, illegals with serious, chronic conditions. I knew that one of the local hospitals has a clinic with a sliding scale, and never asks about documentation. Actually, there are many of these clinics, but I knew about one of them. I made the call, and the patients were assigned to a pcp. End of story. This was eight or ten years ago. Before Romneycare, long before Obamacare.

In the greater Boston area, individuals had health care, but not insurance. Could I have done the same thing as easily in remote areas of the Great Plains? I have no idea, but the health care law won?t provide coverage where doctors choose not to live.

- Aggie

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