Thursday's Lunch

I met with the Thursday doctors' lunch group on March 18, 2010, and found a significant level of apprehension, questioning and mistrust concerning health reform.The first issue was the lack of information on how the ever-changing contents of the reform proposal would affect the practice and economics of physicians. Physicians noted that an ever-increasing number of doctors in our community is moving to concierge practices or refusing new Medicare patients (they had long-ago stopped taking MediCal [Medicaid] because they felt that it was a path to financial ruin). One doctor had called the American Medical Association and found that they were uninformed about new developments in health reform and he related that only the promise of elimination of the 21.5% cut in Medicare payment kept the AMA supporting reform. None of the physicians was trusting of the alliance between the government and health insurers because of their long experience with both. All in all, this group of physicians seemed depressed over their futures.