Health Care BS

UPDATE: 

NEJM has bowdlerized this story. This morning, the link below went directly to data from the survey. Now it takes you to a page about physician recruitment, the second paragraph of which provides a link to The Medicus Firm, which apparently conducted the survey in December.

As Paul Hsieh noted last night, NEJM is “hardly a right-wing rag.” An understatement if ever there was one:

ORIGINAL POST: 

The New England Journal of Medicine has done a physician survey to ascertain Obamacare’s potential impact on the supply of doctors, and the news is both predictable and scary:

46.3% of primary care physicians feel that the passing of health reform will either force them out of medicine or make them want to leave medicine.

And that’s not all:

24% of physicians think they will try to retire early if a public option is implemented.

Why is this predictable? Because one of the most important components of Obamacare is ”cost control” via reduced payments (i.e. government-imposed price controls) for primary care physicians.

Price controls always produce shortages, and underpayment of doctors has already created a PCP shortage for Medicare patients. Obamacare’s price controls will spread that shortage throughout the system.

So, what precisely does this mean for the individual patient? It means that, under Obamacare, we will end up just like the Canadians—-with “universal access” to a WAITING LIST.