Posted by Tina
Obamacare has changed medicine in the United States. It has created a system of winners and losers. It has driven small insurers out of the marketplace and created huge monopolistic insurers that rely on government for subsidies. Those subsidies have fallen short and the system is failing. Obamacare fails to adequately serve and support both patients and doctors, with few exceptions. Sold as legislation to fix problems it has instead fundamentally transformed the medical profession and medical insurance industry. It’s too expensive for too many Americans to use. It’s too expensive for many healthy Americans to even consider; they would rather pay the fine/tax. It has been described as a time wasting bureaucratic nightmare for doctors. It’s forced many doctors out of private practice and into a hospital system and others into early retirement.
One physician, Dr. Anna M. Konopka, believes she has been forced to surrender her medical license because of a system that values electronic medicine over professional judgment, and favors expensive specialists over individualized care. Her story is a tragic testament to the negative state of medicine in America.
Dr. Konopka is 85 years old and has been in private practice, pediatric and internal medicine, in New Hampshire since 1989. She has never been sued for malpractice. She charges $50.00 for an office visit and she treats patients that can’t afford Obamacare and expensive prescriptions. She has kept her prices down by doing the work of her practice herself: “no nurse, no assistant, no secretary.” She’s been under pressure for years and believes the local hospital wants her patients.
Konopka said she signed the agreement because she was told if she didn’t she would lose her license right away and not have the opportunity to treat her patients a final time. She refused to sign any agreement in which she admitted to misconduct, she said.
Under the terms of the surrender, Konopka can get her license back. But she would have to start as a new applicant, and she would have to address the allegations of record-keeping, prescribing and medical decision-making.
Last May, Konopka accepted a Board of Medicine reprimand over her treatment of a child suffering from asthma. The reprimand faulted her for not recording the patient’s weight and height, for leaving dosing decisions up to the child’s parents, and for ordering a prescription for bronchitis without consulting a specialist.
Konopka said she had been treating the child since infancy, and the problem at hand cleared up in three days. …
… Many patients turn to her after local hospitals give elaborate diagnoses and prescribe therapy and specialist treatment that does little good, she said.
Since when is it necessary to send a patient to a “specialist” for bronchitis? This woman is an internal medicine and pediatric doctor! Isn’t that special enough?!!!!
This doctor seems to have satisfied patients and has a good record. She’s been sidelined in her profession because she dares to operate outside the big bureaucratic system created by Obamacare. There’s something fundamentally wrong with a system in America that does not allow an experienced professional to work in her profession and denies those who choose her as their physician the care she provides. She’s absolutely right, it is a system that “…approaches that of communism.”
And if radical progressives get their way and deliver single payer to America we will have a communist system.
There is an alternative health care available for most people, but neither the left or the right are interested because it doesn’t line their pockets with kickbacks.
One is called Atlas MD and for $50 a month for adults and $10 a month for children people have unlimited access to care for FREE. Even home visits are free, Rx costs are pennies on the dollar and xrays including the radiologist’s reading is are in the $20 range.
Everything is covered except for catastrophic care for issues like cancer, heart failure and accidents so a low cost separate plan is advised.
Watch the three videos in this link. The third video with the doctor speaking at the Crowne Plaza is the most informative. The fourth video is about a different plan in Utah which features a family who describes a similar plan coverage.
This is the answer, but this Congress will force us on to BernieCare with the gov’t picking and choosing our quality of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PefZ7jpdr8
“…so a low cost separate plan is advised.”
If you can find one!?! A low cost, high deductible, catastrophic insurance plan is not readily available to all under the manipulative Obamacare regs:
More bureaucratic nonsense just to make a simple purchase! Note too that in many/most cases you still get to pay the fee.
I noticed the building in your video (in Kansas) had what appeared to be an oil company name attached or associated with it. I wonder if the oil company helped to set this up. It would be a good alternative for some employers.
I hope this does spread but it sure would require lawyering-up to keep it legal, an added expense.
One thing this fight about health insurance law has done is expose more specifically those on our side who say one thing and do another and/or those who are more aligned with the left position than that of their own constituents. We’ll see how well some of them survive in the next two elections. One things for sure on healthcare and on tax reform our representatives need to hear from us directly. (You know the left is at it night and day!)
Find contact info for any congressman at Congress.gov
There’s still hope out there to avoid the Sanders/Warren single payer debacle, despite some reporting. The Federalist explains:
Nothing is ever over in Congress, that’s how we ended up with Medicare, expanded Medicare, Medicaid, and the Obamacare with it’s expanded Medicaid…with an eye on single payer. Republicans need to learn this lesson of dogged persistence!
We who want to see a repeal and replacement bill that gives power back to physicians and their patients (the people) and that solves the problems we had prior to Obamacare, like pre-existing conditions, rising premium costs, and opening the ability to purchase across state lines to create competition and more and better choices.
You’re both willfully deluded.
First of all, and by my reckoning, both of you should be on Medicare, so what’s yer problem?
If I’m wrong, and you’ve got a couple years to go … shouldn’t you be rooting for Bernie … and his Medicare for all?
And just so you know, I long ago gave up on a sensible response to this question.
I’m not wasting my time responding to you Libs, because you really don’t care what I believe since it doesn’t align with your socialist/communist point of view. So, I just say ditto to what Tina wrote, since she did such an excellent job.
Ah, but you didn’t tell me … are you on Medicare? Because if you are, then you do indeed align with my socialist world view. Why on earth can’t you admit it?
You worked for a school district, right? So, you pitched, maybe, $400 a month into the Medicare pot. You think you could, now, buy market rate insurance with that?
The bizarro fact is that your belief system is TOTALLY out of whack with our temporal reality here. And this does not bode well for the future of the republic.
A) I’m on Medicare because I had to pay into it for myself and my employees for 30 years. The truth is, as a Boomer, I paid for the generation before mine while debt piled up to threaten future economic prosperity for those who come after me.
B) Being “on Medicare” does not prevent me from having the opinion that it was a stupid program to foist on the people in the first place.
C) I was not given a choice in the matter.
D) I don’t limit my thinking to selfishness, covetousness, and greed. I think in terms of a bigger picture that includes creating policy that keeps our nation and it’s citizens more economically healthy and personally responsible.
E) I believe in personal charity over government dependency, which kills the spirit and destroys self-reliance.
F) I believe in personal responsibility. It’s difficult for citizens to take responsibility for their own care when our schools fail to properly educate and prepare kids for adulthood…your politics works there too, to keep citizens dumb and dependent.
Don’t act so smug, Libby, I “long ago gave up” on you getting my very “sensible response.”
You don’t want to get it. Instead you double down on a program that’s shiny on the surface (free, free, free) because there were a lot of boomers working through good times to support a much smaller WWII generation on Medicare. (Even so our debt grew fast.) Things have changed. The longer it goes the more working people will be forced to “pony up. ” The longer it goes the more government will limit care to “save money.” The longer it goes the more broken it will become.
Utopia NEVER turns out. Only dim bulbs believe a free gourmet lunch for all is possible.
“B) Being “on Medicare” does not prevent me from having the opinion that it was a stupid program to foist on the people in the first place.”
Indeed. And you can take yourself off of it anytime … lend some real moral heft to your position.
“I don’t limit my thinking to selfishness, covetousness, and greed.”
You certainly do. They are the chief motivations behind your opposition to universal health care in this country. Do you really think you’re fooling anybody with all this “individual freedom” horsepucky? We all know you’re only too happy to grant your fellow citizens the “freedom” to suffer and die, rather than participate in a communal effort to provide coverage for all.
“Utopia NEVER turns out.”
What Utopia? We’re talking about universal health care coverage. America is the ONLY developed nation that does not have such a thing. It’s effing shameful.
Libby you’re talking about universal coverage NOW. This is just another step in your 70 year push to make America a socialist nation.
Your party has a long history of taking over the responsibility of individual citizens and replacing it with government control. Welfare has contributed greatly to decimate poor families.
Maxine Waters let the cat out of the bag for Democrats when she slipped and talked about “taking over” the oil companies…yep, control of industry is also on the “to do” list. Obamacare represents a takeover of the health insurance industry and the medical profession.
Why would I “take myself off” something I purchased just to make a point? I’d be a fool. I will do what I can to free future generations from debt and higher FICA payments and I will do my part to educate them about the childish folly in government dependency. I will also encourage innovation with power and control vested in the people and local governments.
Maybe you should refuse Medicare when the time comes to support your notion that your party was wrong not to do UHC from the start.
“They are the chief motivations behind your opposition to universal health care in this country.”
A very stupid response. Only a child would stomp her feet and try to get the adult in the room to say that “universal healthcare” would be good for the country and it’s people. Even Democrats in liberal California admitted that the idea is foolish becasue it would cost too much. It would also put limits on care within a very short time to save money and those limits would ht the poor hardest.
Libby you think like a child. You want to make things fair in an unfair world. You want to stick it to the wealthy to save the poor and neither you nor any government can do that.
What we can do is create abundance and opportunity. We can create wonderful charitable organizations to take care of the poor when they face catastrophic illnesses. We can let the individual states decide how to structure care for the poor and learn, in the laboratory of the states, which ideas work best. And we can take the very expensive and limiting government bureaucracy out of the equation to bring the costs down so that healthcare is reasonable.
“We all know you’re only too happy to grant your fellow citizens the “freedom” to suffer and die, rather than participate in a communal effort to provide coverage for all.”
What a nasty mouth you have…need some soap?
You are a free woman! Put your efforts and energy where your mouth is. Gather together with your friends, find a few local sponsors (Google, Apple, Facebook) and create local “free clinics” for the poor. Be entrepreneurial! I assure you you will do a better job than the government becasue you will have to answer for the expense side of your Leger!
“America is the ONLY developed nation that does not have such a thing. It’s effing shameful.”
You’re right about one thing. A half a$$ed program that places a lot of debt on future generations is not right. Your demand for UHC is an admission that the beloved program, Medicare doesn’t work. It’s a failure…a rip off in the long run. And your economically ignorant enough to think doubling down will improve things.
The thing that’s effing shameful is the fact that we have so many poor and destitute people in this country.
The thing that effing shameful is the fact that healthcare is so expensive…there’s no reason it has to be!
Government involvement has driven the costs UP.
The UHC idea, and all other lefty dependency programs, would never seen the light of day if people were properly educated in our schools and if our families were still intact…leftist ideals and policies have helped to destroy both along with opportunity and the economy.
Other nations deliver inferior or limited care and the tax it takes to run them is excessive. Debt piles up. Those nations as a whole are not healthy. The people live like children in the care of their parents, the government. That can’t last forever.
Yes Libby, you do reach for a Utopean culture. But you don’t recognize the lie in your “communal” theory, “Everybody contributes to the pot and we all share equally.” We don’t all contribute to the pot in that system and we certainly never share equally.” It doesn’t work that way. Some people get a totally free ride and others get special care. You break the system, rob people of individual choice and freedom and end up back in the same reality of unfairness.
In America we proved that freedom, prosperity, and charity will better serve individuals from all walks of life and result in more satisfaction for all. No system is perfect but the ideals of America work better…much better than the ideals of Marx and Lenin.