Scary Health Care Stuff

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J.D. Tuccille has a piece up on Reason magazine about some aspects of health care to look forward to. They're based on a recent survey of physicians by The Physician's Foundation. Among the troubling statistics:

• 60.6 percent of physicians say they would retire today if they could (up from 45 percent in 2008)
• 33.5 percent of physicians say they wouldn't go into medicine if they had their careers to do over (up from 27 percent in 2008)
• Physicians are seeing 16.6% fewer patients per day than they did in 2008, a decline that could lead to tens of millions of fewer patients seen per year.
• Over 52 percent of physicians have limited the access Medicare patients have to their practices or are planning to do so.
• Over 26 percent of physicians have closed their practices to Medicaid patients.
• In the next one to three years, over 50 percent of physicians plan to cut back on patients, work part-time, switch to concierge medicine, retire or take other steps that would reduce patient access to their services.

I don't know about my current physician, Dr. Courtney Ladika. I haven't asked her. Then again, I didn't ask my last two doctors, either. They brought it up first.

They both volunteered that they thought health care should be a right and government should pay for it. This, despite the fact that doctors that accept MediCare and MediCal patients are increasingly hard to find, especially around here. Didn't make sense to me, but maybe that's why both of them recently retired?