Hidden within hundreds of pages of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are a few paragraphs, imagine that, a few paragraphs dedicated to all those individuals who are currently enrolled in the Medicare health insurance program after years of being employed. You are probably looking forward to your reward that you paid into during the course of your career and now the rules are changing.
There have been a few minor changes implemented already and there is another one coming up on July 1, 2010. What is that phrase, death by a thousand cuts? Currently under way under the guise of the Department of Health and Human Services will be a health insurance affairs council titled the National Prevention, Health, Promotion, and Public Health Council. This arm of the health insurance program is specifically to develop a National Prevention and Health Promotion Strategy for we the people.
Now what does this mean for you? This means that your government is concerned for your personal health care and is going to set up a program for we the people to participate because your government wants to help you to remain healthy and fit through their personalized health insurance system. You already know some of it because you have heard it being recited many times.
1. Eat healthy foods to keep you fit and trim
2. Exercise at least a half hour twice a day
3. Refrain from tobacco products and alcohol
4. Only take prescribed medication, stay away from over the counter medication
Current medical physicians will be receiving a twenty-one percent reduction in reimbursement payments when it pertains to Medicare patients. This is currently prompting health care institutions all across the country to refuse to treat Medicare patients such as hospitals, medical physicians, hospices, and outpatient clinics.
There are currently a few states that have already heard from their medical health care physicians who already have stopped taking on new Medicare patients and are limiting their current Medicare patients. So where does all this leave you? Where does this leave you when you enter the emergency room of your local community hospital and they refuse to help you?
What needs to be analyzed and acted upon is eliminating fraud and abuse from the Medicare health care system, not eliminating or refusing the current Medicare patients. What this new health care reform bill will do is push the current and future Medicare patients into the Medicaid health insurance system thereby opening the back door once again to the single-payer system.