As of June 30th, our small town will lose its only medical clinic. Dignity Health Medical Group “apologizes for any inconvenience this closure may cause.” Our clinic has been a Boulder Creek mainstay for 60 years. For 50 of those years, it was a private practice. Dignity Health purchased it ten years ago. Now they tell us they have not been able to find a new clinic site. (Huh? What’s wrong with the existing site?)
Even though there’s a shortage of primary care doctors, multibillion-dollar
corporations are gobbling up primary care practices. (Example: CVS paid $11
billion to buy a chain of primary care centers.) Here’s why: primary care
doctors oversee vast numbers of patients and thus have the potential to bring
business and profits to hospital systems, health insurers, and/or pharmacies. Now,
nearly seven in 10 of all doctors are either employed by a hospital or a
corporation. This type of consolidation is driven
by the quest for profits, not patients’ welfare, as some would have you
believe.
There’s a big pot of money everyone is aiming at, money that
comes from the growing privatization of Medicare. More than half of Medicare’s 60
million beneficiaries have signed up for a Medicare Advantage program. Medicare
Advantage is not supplemental insurance as many of us believed. They are
private insurers that are reimbursed by the government. (Ours is Anthem.) Medicare
pays these insurers $400 billion a year.
One doctor, who works for an investor-owned company, must
work longer hours in order to supply additional diagnoses for patients. The
more diagnoses a doctor can supply, the more federal reimbursement the company
gets under the Medicare Advantage program. “It’s not because I’m giving better
patient care. It’s all tied to the billing,” she says.
As to the Boulder Creek clinic’s closure, I’m convinced that
they simply don’t make enough money to satisfy Dignity Health, which, by the
way, is the fifth-largest
healthcare provider in the country and the largest provider in California.
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
Yes, thank you, Connie. Dignity took over our county hospital recently. Neighbor's daughter, an ER nurse there, reports to him that staff has been reduced and they have new uniforms, more rules.
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