Insight from an actual Doctor....

So, I recently had my annual eye exam.  I asked the eye doctor what he thought about Obamacare.  Here are some anecdotes from our conversation:

• My Doctor said he believes the goal is to create an assembly line approach to his type of practice where there would be building complexes of eye doctors.  Each doctor would have about 5 minutes per patient to do the exam and then on to the next (my appointment took and hour.  I checked out fine, in case you were wondering).

• My Doctor told me that last week a man came into his office and said he wanted his free glasses.  When my Doctor asked the guy what he meant, the guy said he's got his Obama-phone and food stamps, now that healthcare is free, he wants his free glasses.  I specifically asked my Doctor if he thought the guy was serious and he said it was all perfectly serious.  The guy expected free glasses.

• Then my Doctor went on to explain that he keeps getting notices from Medicare seeking his "group number" in order to be reimbursed.  Since is is a sole practitioner he does have a "group number".  So every time he gets one of these notices he has to spend about an hour on the phone calling Medicare to get it straightened out.  Every time, when he finally reaches the right person they'll say, "Oh, you're right, you don't need a group number because you're a sole practitioner."  To which he'll ask, "Is there a way you can fix it in your system so I don't keep getting asked for my group number?"  And they'll say, "No, that is handled by another department."  

• Until last year, he had to send in his Medicare Claims via a dial-up service.  Yes.  Dial-up.  Some of you my be too young to remember the good old days of 56kps dial-up service with AOL or Earthlink, be I'm serious.  He had to unplug his fax line and use a telephone line to transmit Medicare files until January of this year.  

• But wait!  It gets better!  Not only did they have to use the dial-up service until last year, they had to store their back-ups on 3.5 floppy discs.  YES, THEY DID!  The past few times he upgraded his computer systems he had to purchase stand alone 3.5 floppy drives in order to be compliant.

So this on top of the healthcare.gov website debacle should make you're head spin.  What were they thinking?  One of the biggest reason's Obamacare is failing is because it was too big to begin with....

Healthcare in the U.S. represents 1/6th of the GDP of our country.  This is roughly equivalent to the size of the ENTIRE French economy.  How can this be allowed, much less be constitutional?

Next, I'll be taking a look at the new HIPAA Privacy Practices document I had to sign.  It is even more disturbing....