Obama Controls Doctors

The White House will create teams of “undercover patients” to check what the waiting time is in each office.

Americans complain of the lack of internists, family doctors, etc. Their feelings are reflected in professional studies. According to the Massachusetts Medical Society, 53 percent of family doctors and 51 percent of internists receive only steady patients. New patients have to wait to be admitted by the remaining doctors, which can take a while. The wait for a family doctor on average is 36 days and 48 days for an internist.

The White House wants to help solve this problem and also see what might happen in 2014, when 30 million currently uninsured Americans get access to medical care, thanks to Obama’s health reform bill.

Barack Obama’s administration is working on creating a team of “undercover patients.” Much like secret shoppers in stores or banks check the quality of service, these “patients” will try to arrange an appointment with a doctor.

The $350,000 Project

The undercover patients will call about 4,185 doctors in nine states. Each office will receive two calls from these “agents.” According to The New York Times, the Obama team wants to see if doctors send away patients with government sponsored insurance in favor of those with expensive private plans.

Every tenth doctor will also get a third phone call from the undercover patient, this time introducing themselves as an employee of the federal government, who will ask if the office takes patients insured with Medicaid and Medicare. This study, which will cost $350,000, has the goal of catching the discrepancies between the official policy and practice.

The White House plans have infuriated doctors. “This is an idea worthy of a Soviet Big Brother. Spying on doctors is not only useless and bad. In America, it is something completely unimaginable,” says Dr. Daniel Johnson, a radiologist from Louisiana, an expert at the Heritage Foundation and the former chair of the World Medical Association (WMA). According to him, the study is a “waste of taxpayer money.” “The government will surely not solve the problem of the lack of doctors, who are undervalued by the current health system,” Dr. Johnson states. He further explains that students become family doctors or pediatricians very unwillingly, as there are more lucrative specialist positions.

Bad Reform?

Doctors have long warned that the health care overhaul pushed through by President Obama will have negative consequences for the system. According to a Reuters/HCPlexus national survey of doctors, only 18 percent of respondents believe that the system will improve with the implementation of reform, and 65 percent are of the opinion that it will get worse.

The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that by 2025, the United States will have a shortage of doctors, by about 160,000.