Single Payer Healthcare - Effect on Medical Industry

[XenaLives]

"Would a Single-Payer System Require Painful Sacrifices From Doctors?"

NY Times article on physician reimbursement under Single Payer:

Excerpt:

In sum, although the switch to a single-payer system would entail lower payments to service providers like doctors, it would also affect their frames of reference and conditions of employment in offsetting ways. International happiness studies offer no reason to conclude that, once it has been fully implemented and absorbed, the switch would require truly significant sacrifices by most American health care providers.

There would of course be exceptions.

As Atul Gawande described in a much-cited New Yorker article, current reimbursement arrangements have encouraged some physicians to view their practices less as centers for healing than as revenue streams. Some have invested in image centers and clinics to which they refer patients for scans and treatment, capturing insurance reimbursements for themselves directly.

Others demand kickbacks for referring patients to home-health agencies. And because most insurers don’t reimburse for phone calls, patients who call with questions that could easily be answered by phone are often told to schedule reimbursable office visits. Physicians who adopt these practices may earn seven- or even eight-figure annual incomes.

Because meaningful health reform would eliminate the incentives for these abuses, we can be sure that at a small number of doctors would suffer steep income declines. These few might scream bloody murder. And, as many Californians may discover, moving immediately to single-payer health care will require a host of trade-offs, some of them painful over the short-term.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/would-a-single-payer-system-require-painful-sacrifices-from-doctors.html