Seniors Living Under Obamacare
“I moved into this nice apartment complex, big medical complex across the street, I thought, “How lucky am I?’ And I went there and was told in the waiting room, well they just don’t take Medicare patients. One of the receptionists said to me, “Well honey, it’s just going to get worse.’”
Under ObamaCare, “seniors have been singled out and forced to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of a new entitlement for young people.”
In 2012, a survey found that 74% of doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients or will leave Medicare entirely because of Obamacare.
The American Medical Association opposed the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) created under ObamaCare which is authorized to make “arbitrary across-the-board cuts to physicians and other providers.”
More than 20 percent of primary care doctors will not accept new Medicare patients due to low reimbursements for the care they provide. Under ObamaCare, by 2019 reimbursements to doctors for Medicare services will be below those for Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor, which almost 50 percent of doctors refuse to accept.
Starting in 2014 under ObamaCare, the unelected members of IPAB are required every year to make specific recommendations for cutting spending in Medicare. If an alternative to these recommendations is not passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, the unelected HHS Secretary is authorized to unilaterally make these cuts.
Under ObamaCare, the nature of IPAB will keep it focused on short-term cuts because it has to make recommendations every year instead of focusing on long-term improvements to the quality of Medicare.