Medical Providers Stare In Disbelief At Obama's Proposals

From the AP headline, you would think it is the fault of the medical providers that yet another aspect of Obamacare is falling apart:

Obama plan for health care quality dealt a setback

But, being that the plan was...oh, I don't know, perhaps "insane" is the best word - maybe a more honest headline like "Obama plan deemed unworkable by experts" would have been more apt.  But honesty left the building about a decade ago, so this is what we're left with.

This, and the imminent destruction of the American health care system:

President Barack Obama's main idea for getting quality health care at less cost was in jeopardy Wednesday after key medical providers called his administration's initial blueprint so complex it's unworkable.


Just over a month ago, the administration released long-awaited draft regulations for "accountable care organizations," networks of doctors and hospitals that would collaborate to keep Medicare patients healthier and share in the savings with taxpayers. Obama's health care overhaul law envisioned quickly setting up hundreds of such networks around the county to lead a bottom-up reform of America's bloated [excuse me? a bit of editorializing, no? -ed] health care system.

But in an unusual [really? - ed.] rebuke, an umbrella group representing premier organizations such as the Mayo Clinic wrote the administration Wednesday saying that more than 90 percent of its members would not participate, because the rules as written are so onerous it would be nearly impossible for them to succeed.

"It's not just a simple tweak, it's a significant change that needs to be made," said Donald Fisher, president of the American Medical Group Association, which represents nearly 400 large medical groups around the country providing care for roughly 1 in 3 Americans. Its members, including the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, and Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, had been seen as the vanguard for accountable care.

The medical groups say they are worried they will be left holding the bag for losses, that the government has designed things so there is no easy way to tell which patients are part of the program, and that there's no reliable way to adjust for patients who are sicker and require closer follow-up and more expensive treatments


The regulations are "overly prescriptive, operationally burdensome, and the incentives are too difficult to achieve to make this voluntary program attractive," the medical group association said in its letter. One of the major problems seems to be that medical groups have little experience in managing insurance risk, and the administration blueprint rapidly exposes them to potential financial losses.
 
Fisher, the medical association head, said he does not think the administration will easily back off its approach, because on paper it saves the government money.
 
What a shock.  Barack's bureaucratic minions have come up with a plan with rules impossible to follow, and are designed to force the medical community to take losses that used to be the proviso of the federal government.  And despite the fact the plan is DOA, he's going to push it through, regardless of the danger that it could cause a complete collapse in a key component of the health care delivery system.
 
But that's not a bug to Barack, it's a feature.  Perhaps the feature.  From the outset he can claim the medical community is not "obeying the letter of the law", despite the fact that from the outset they are claiming they can't figure out what "the law" is. And once his onerous rules force medical providers into bankruptcy, he can then declare private medicine a failure, and take over the entire system himself.
 
Presto!  Socialized medicine before his second term is out.
 
And people say Obama isn't smart....