Well, the RACs are in town. I earlier warned about the government’s desire to pay out
as little as possible for medical care. RAC review records from hospitals and
physicians.
Readers should care because the RACs will hound hospitals and physicians until they
have bled them dry with every perceived infraction of some bureaucrat’s ideas of
how things should be done – and that bureaucrat has no conception of how to
practice medicine. Hospitals and physicians are not fools. They can determine
what the RACs consider to be "errors" and not allow themselves to be
drawn into those traps. And this will compromise your medical care.
This is nothing short of rationing your medical care by Washington bureaucrats, who
don’t have the slightest idea of how to take care of ill people. There is no
replacement for the considered opinion – and sometimes, the "gut"
feeling – of an experienced physician.
If your physician senses the need to put you in the hospital, you need to be there
because otherwise if the physician the physician plays along with the Washington
bureaucrats’ ill-informed ideas of how to deliver medical care, he/she may miss
the early signs of significant disease, and that could put your health,
well-being, and even life in danger. It’s a real-life "horns of a
dilemma." If you enter the hospital and don’t die, the RAC’s will say that
you did not need to be in hospital, so return any money paid; if you are not
admitted to hospital and you do die, well, it’s all the fault of the physician,
who should have admitted you in the first place. You will pay the price in the
long run.
In England, the above scenario is standard practice. Everything that I have noted
above has happened to friends and relatives of mine, which is why I say to my
patients, "Go visit England, but if you get sick, get out of England."
And that’s a shame, because English medicare was once the best in the world.
Write your congressman and President Obama. Tell them to scrap the current program,
and come up with something better – or you will not vote for them. I would hope
that they would listen – it’s an election year.
W.E. Feeman Jr., MD
Bowling Green