Mark Steyn
Investors.com
12/14/2012
…Under the Supreme National Coordinator, the United States government is setting up a national database for everybody’s medical records, so that if a Texan hiker falls off Mount Katahdin after walking the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s first responders will be able to know exactly how many bisexual gun-owners she’s slept with, and afford her the necessary care.
This great medical advance is supposed to be fully implemented by 2014, so the government is providing incentives for doctors to comply. Under the EHR Incentive Program, if a doctor makes “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHR), he’s eligible for “bonuses” from the feds — a mere $44,000 from Medicare, for example, but up to $63,750 from Medicaid.
If you have a practice at 27 Elm Street and you’re treating the elderly widow from 22 Elm Street, she’s unlikely to meet the federally mandated bi-guy requirement, but you can still qualify for bonuses by filing her smoking status with Washington.
For medical facilities in upscale suburbs, EHR is costly and time-consuming, and, along with a multitude of other ObamaCare regulatory burdens, helping drive doctors to opt out entirely.
My comrade Michelle Malkin noted the other day that her own general practitioner has now switched over to “concierge care,” under which all third parties (whether private insurers or government) are dumped and a patient contracts with his doctor solely through his checkbook. Some concierge docs will even make house calls: everything old is new again! (For as long as the new federal commissars permit it.)
But in the broken-down rural hinterlands, EHR and other novelties make it more lucrative for surviving medical centers to prioritize federal paperwork over patient care…
Read the complete article at Investors.com
Update: Found of Domino’s Pizza sues Feds over ‘gravely immoral’ aspects of Obamacare
The founder of Domino’s Pizza is suing the federal government over mandatory contraception coverage in the health care law.
Tom Monaghan, a devout Roman Catholic, says abortion and contraception aren’t health care but a “gravely immoral” practice.
He filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court. It also lists as a plaintiff Domino’s Farms, a Michigan office park complex that Monaghan owns…
