Amid the ObamaCare fiasco, the latest is that physicians will be subject to streams of grubby government spies checking up on their Medicare patient intake. This isn’t Eurosocialist care anymore. This is the Soviet Union.
In a front-page news story, the New York Times reported Monday that Obama administration officials intend to recruit a team of workplace spies they call “mystery shoppers” whose task will be to call up U.S. private physicians under false pretenses, fraudulently pose as patients and pry information out of their medical office staff about what kind of payment arrangements these doctors are taking from patients these days. It’s the sort of sting operation lawmen normally reserve for suspected criminals.
The Health and Human Services Department says its stealth survey is just a well-intentioned effort to learn if there’s a doctor shortage, now that ObamaCare has extended medical care to 30 million new patients.
“These newly insured Americans will need to seek out new primary care physicians, further exacerbating the already growing problem,” as an HHS document put it.
In reality, it’s a Stasi-like move to identify “hoarders” of medical services, much as East Germany domestic spies known as Stasi did to producers and service providers under communism.
It also amounts to a de facto effort to intimidate doctors into accepting Medicare and Medicaid patients at artificially low rates so as not to attract government scrutiny. The snoops, after all, will know which doctors aren’t seeing Medicare patients, and the HHS claim that nobody is being targeted is only true until it isn’t.
“This out-of-control bureaucracy apparently isn’t satisfied with just writing hundreds of new regulations needed to enforce ObamaCare,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., an M.D. who has spoken out for doctors in the past, said in an email to IBD.
“They’ve taken to wasting taxpayer dollars harassing doctor’s offices and impeding productivity. One can only assume this Big Brother tactic is part of a larger plan to force doctors to accept government insurance, whether they like it or not,” he said.
That there’s a shortage of physicians in the U.S. comes as no surprise. A survey of doctors by IBD in 2009 found a majority intended to leave the profession if Obama-Care passed, in part because government-dictated rates fall below their own cost of doing business.
That’s why shortages have cropped up in every socialized system — whether it’s wheat in the USSR or Zimbabwe, medical care in Havana, or oil, electricity, water and food in Caracas. And it’s another reason why ObamaCare must not be allowed to stand in the U.S.