The upcoming election will have a direct and significant effect on local medical care.
Beebe Healthcare recently announced that it has started a new program for patients discharged from the hospital who have no physician for followup medical care.
If you are new to the area and try to get an appointment with most physicians, you will be told either that the doctor is not accepting new patients or be put on a long waiting list.
One of the main causes of our physician shortage is the great change in medical decision-making in the last few years. It used to be that doctors could decide what was best for their patients. They felt that their training, expertise and experience were valued. Now, many decisions are made by big-business insurance companies. Their executives make millions of dollars a year, partly by denying treatments that physicians consider medically necessary. Doctors and other medical personnel feel overworked and unappreciated. They must waste valuable time appealing to the insurance companies for treatments they ethically feel that their patients need.
As a result of all this, medical personnel who can do so are retiring before they had planned to. Others are leaving private practice to work directly for insurance companies or for private agencies that employ medical professionals on a per-day basis.
Every medical office must have good clerical support staff to function properly. The increased work required by the big-business medical insurance companies is depriving our Cape area medical offices of the clerical staff they need. Two reasons they leave: more and more paperwork is required by the insurance companies. Also, there are more calls to medical practices from people looking for a physician to see them.
One of my own doctors told me they have been short-staffed for years, because so many clerical personnel quit soon after initial training. At another of my doctor’s offices, I tried to make a scheduling call and got the message that there were nine people waiting before me.
According to an Oct. 23 article in ProPublica, big-business insurance companies are denying tens of millions of claims a year.
If you or someone in your family needs an urgent medical procedure in two years, your hospital will likely still do it. However, whether your medical insurance pays for it or you are stuck with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars could be decided by the results of this election.
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