I’m happy about Powell supporting Obama, but there is something much more disturbing about this grab. 

The AMA is spreading propaganda about being on the side of the uninsured in America?  That’s simply laughable.

They’re on the side of specialists. Not primary care doctors. Not patients. Their policies worsen health care spending in America. They use their political sway to skew how doctors are paid toward expensive specialist care. If they really wanted to help the uninsured, they would start with rewriting the rules within the RUC so that we pay more for communication and relationships within primary care, rather than encouraging doctors do more because they get paid more.

Instead, they spread propaganda. Don’t believe the hype. If you read the proposal, it only talks about expanding health insurance coverage.  This is the message of the day and both McCain and Obama continue to spread this worthless policy.  Massachusetts got this bright idea as well a few years back. They made being uninsured illegal and punishable by massive fines. So they added hundreds of thousands of new people to the insurance pool. Then wait times for a doctor went up to an average 52 days. People were mandated to purchase something for $600 dollars a month that they couldn’t even use! They didn’t fix the supply side of primary care doctors before they fixed the patient demand side. And not a single primary care doc at Harvard is accepting new patients right now.

And now, 2% of all doctors this year are planning on going into primary care. Obama, wake up. Expanding coverage without encouraging more doctors to go into primary care will worsen our crisis. We’ll all be paying $500 for a visit to an Otolaryngolist for a simple little ear infection, instead of $100 for a visit to a pediatrician.

And premiums will continue to skyrocket…