Steve M finds the Drudge pimping some unbelievably implausible “study” (by a right-wing astroturf group, promoted by the Daily Caller) which claims that 83% of doctors may go Galt because of Obamacare.
The key statistic being cited here is so absurdly skewed that even the wingers who cooked up the survey can’t seriously expect it to be cited by the mainstream press. Clearly the plan is for the number to be so memorable to the credulous that it will show up in small-town letters to the editor (here you go) and now make its way onto talk radio and Fox and right-wing blogs. From there it will become gospel truth, posted on thousands of message boards, memorized by rank-and-file wingers and thrown in the faces of liberals and swing voters. Such a high number! And so specific! It must be true, right?
So much energy, expended in such bad faith.
I don’t know if the contemporary right-wing freak show is something new under the sun, but it’s a radical departure from what any sane person might consider sensical discussion. I mean, it doesn’t even try to sound believable. It’s prima facie bullshit.
But, hey, both sides do it. One time an anonymous Kos commenter compared Bush to Hitler! And conservatives just think differently. You librul elites don’t appreciate the Burkean minimalism of absurd right-wing fiction. Real Americans get it. Get the fuck off the Upper West Side and go to the Applebee’s salad bar. You’ll see that Drudge is, and deserves to be, today’s Walter Cronkite.
donovong
Congresswoman Kathy McWhatshername from Washington state was spouting this bullshit on MSNBC this morning, so the Wurlitzer is fully wound…
Nutella
The majority of doctors support single payer so if they’re fed up with ACA it’s because it doesn’t go far enough.
Maude
General Stuck was right. When Obama was elected, the righties went crazy.
Brian R.
The contemporary right-wing freak show is nothing new. They’ve been shitting their pants with insane conspiracy theories since Roosevelt. (Teddy, that is.)
They insisted FDR was a “secret Jew,” Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent, and Lyndon Johnson a soci-alist tyrant hellbent on snuffing out liberty.
The only difference between then and now is that, back in the day, actual journalists knew that these people were insane and didn’t bother reporting their conspiracy theories. Murrow and Cronkite just dismissed them out of hand.
But now Wolf Blitzer waits on their every word like it’s Moses coming down Mt. Sinai, legitimizing the insanity and encouraging its spread.
Thanks, TeaNN!
eric
73% of doctors reject disease and sickness; the other 27% accept that some say disease and sickness are a sign of god’s love and should be embraced as a gift.
I think this could be fun: 48% of republicans believe that math should be taught using slide rules, the other 55% believe that math should be taught from a biblical perspective.
Betty Cracker
One branch of my family is practically 100% medical professionals, and if they are any indication, the “study” results are as fishy as the teabagger outfit that funded it. Doctors and nurses know better than most how fucked up our system is…
Rafer Janders
It’s important to keep in mind that 38.9% of all statistics are false.
Xboxershorts
I’ve pissed off a shit load of firebaggers by telling them they’re being played by the largest, most well funded and deceitful propaganda network ever devised by mankind.
They call me names, unfriend me, send me vapid emails with all kinds of insults and tell me to fuck off.
All I can say is….remember the outrage when Obama authorized horse slaughter.
Wake the fuck up.
jl
@Nutella:
thanks.
I can only add that 100 percent of the population may go mad and rendered unfit to govern themselves from this nonsense. I determined that fact through Science.
And the US healthcare system is such a mess, I would not be surprized by a survey that found a large majority of doctors considered quitting at one time or another, regardless of the ACA.
Chris
@Maude:
As they did under Clinton, they just have a bigger and better media infrastructure now.
Hilariously, I’ve started to read conservative lament the demise of “reasonable,” “pragmatic,” “moderate” Democrats like Bill Clinton. Too bad you assholes wouldn’t give him the time of day when he was president, eh? You might actually have ended up with your own version of the fifties/sixties liberal consensus.
pauj
For a lot of medical needs a person that gives a shit looking stuff up on the internet can be more useful than some money-grubbing doctor (a subset, I’m sure) that thinks he’s Gods gift and should hold out for the big bucks.
Lets’ create some competition for doctors and allow more technicians do do the easy stuff. Those are usually the people that spend the most time with you anyway.
Lets figure out how to convert insurance industry employeees into health-care delivery employees.
My stepson was 15 before a physicians assistant noticed he may have Marfan Syndrome.
What was his doctors doing all those years?
Butch
Bill Bryson’s Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid brings up a bunch of examples of right-wing nuttery from the 1950s. It’s somehow not comforting to know that it’s nothing new.
jl
And the DPMA rings a bell. I think I read about them as being part of a very reactionary and small movement among the medical profession, that does not recognize any social responsibility from being a medical professional at all. Very different from majority of doctors. DPMA is basically: you get the Hyppocratic as long as you can cough up the bucks I demand, and I feel like it.
Cripes,your standard issue Professional Engineer has a more develped sense of social obligation than these people.
Roger Moore
“Considered quitting” is complete bullshit. Wake me up when a meaningful number of doctors actually quit. Until then it’s nothing but posturing, even if the number is true.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Personally, I always thought Mussolini or Franco were more accurate touchstones for comparison to Bush fils level of fascism.
.
BGinCHI
Where is the goddamn AMA on this?
Are they sitting on their hands for some reason? Jesus, they can’t be that conservative, can they?
We have any medical docs on this blog? WTF is going on in your world?
Frankensteinbeck
@Rafer Janders:
80% of all statistics are completely made up. It’s amazing that at least 41.1% of made up statistics are true, isn’t it?
EDIT – @BGinCHI:
The AMA is heavily conservative. This drives doctors, most of whom are liberal but need the AMA as an organizing body, crazy.
Chris
If I was at my computer, I’d post the “Yes, Prime Minister” clip with Humphrey explaining to Bernard how you got people to give the desired answer to a poll. It’s hilarious.
scav
Little OT earthtremor on the Lords of the Universe side, Financial sect: PFGBest founder ‘attempts suicide as $200m goes missing from accounts’
Remember: 11 o’clock and all’s well or would be if there weren’t soo many strangling regulations on the job creators.
cmorenc
Another classic piece of complete RW bullshit that has been in widespread, continuous circulation is the purported electronic copies of a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama (from BCBS representative Peggy Riehle) to its subscribers informing them that their Medicare monthly fee would hugely increase under the Obamacare legislation from 96.40 per month (in 2011) to 247.00 in 2014, and that the timing of the increase is purposely delayed to avoid making this an issue in the 2012 Election.
The electronic letter even bears the purported logo of BCBS of Alabama. This purported document originated when Peggy Riehle received a viral email making these false claims on her home email and inappropriately redistributed them from her work computer, where the electronic logo was added without any authorization or approval from BCBS/Alabama.
The claims about the amount of increases are bogus, as are claims that any increases in rates have anything to do whatever with the ACA legislation (they don’t).
Brian R.
@Chris:
Exactly.
When Clinton borrowed ideas and themes from the Republicans in 1995 and 1996, during the Dick Morris Triangularization period, the GOP howled in anger. I never understood why. When the other side accepts your ideas as their own (see Eisenhower and the New Deal), that means you’ve won. They couldn’t accept that.
And now, when Obama borrows their ideas — as he did on the individual mandate in health care, or as he did with cap-and-trade — the GOP has decided to play a different game. Now they’re not saying Obama stole their ideas, they’re saying those ideas were never ever theirs and are, in fact, nothing but godless evil soci-alism.
Because nothing says “soci-alist” like “dreamed up in the Heritage Foundation,” right?
Anonymous At Work
I immediately thought of How I Met Your Mother, because Neil Patrick Harris’s character uses made-up statistics to prove his point, always involving 83%. Are you sure this isn’t a joke along those lines?
Roger Moore
@scav:
The most surprising thing about this is that a MOTU appears to feel enough shame or remorse about the issue to attempt suicide. The correct MOTU response is to blame the victims for trusting you and, if you’re potentially legally liable, disappear to a country with no extradition treaty.
nipsip
From the website of the organization that conducted the study: “It is DPMA’s position that PPACA is the Destruction Of Our Medicine, attempting to insert the government and bureaucrats between the relationship and decisions of medical professional and their patient”
Probably sent it to their members.
j
Jeez, look what was in the comments section of that “letter to the editor” ( linked above) after someone debunked every part of it.
In other words “I can’t hear you…lalalalalalalala”
Wingnuts are beyond hope.
Rafer Janders
@Roger Moore:
It’s not as if doctors have any other real marketable skills, other than being doctors, that is. If they quit they’ll do…what, exactly?
scav
@Roger Moore: Must be cause he’s in IA and didn’t go to the right parties to pick up all the fine lingo and accent.
Davis X. Machina
It’s advertising. It’s not the dispassionate search for truth.
Much, if not most, modern advertising is about keeping the customers your product already has. And that means not doing anything new. The target market for Drudge has an already-proven, and apparently bottomless, appetite for bullshit.
They want bullshit. They don’t want to have to expend the effort to work out whether something is bullshit — it’s got to read as bullshit at first glance.
Cassidy
Kill it with fire.
Roger Moore
@Rafer Janders:
Hang out in Galt’s Gulch waiting for the rest of us to come crawling back to them admitting they were right all along. Nobody ever said their plan was reasonable or had a decent chance of success.
Chris
@Brian R.:
It’s for the same reason these people scream and howl about “American Exceptionalism” and are outraged when we’re put on the same level ad any other country, despite the fact that we live in a world that’s largely defined by American values, ideologies and institutions and “American Exceptionalism” really means jack shit in such a world.
That also isn’t a bad thing, means we’ve won. But to them it’s not about bringing other people to your side, it’s about having people to hate and look down on. They depend on the Evil Other as much as the old NSDAP did.
AliceBlue
According to the Mahablog, DPMA is a member of the National Tea Party Federation and American Grassroots Coalition.
There ya go.
Todd
Clearly, these Job Creators were regulated into insolvency.
Culture of Truth
I quit! I swear I will! THEN you’ll be SORRY!!
Percysowner
I have to say that one of my doctors does go on about how low the reimbursements from Medicare (or possibly Medicaid) are for her field and that many of her colleagues refuse to take Medicare patients anymore and who may be leaving their practices because of the ACA. She does claim that the AMA isn’t made up of practicing doctors and that it doesn’t really represent the opinion of most MD’s. I tend to say nothing because I don’t know enough about Medicare and reimbursement rates. Plus the ACA is keeping private insurance, so I’m not certain what her problem is.
Basically I have ONE anecdotal statement that there are some doctors who have problems with the ACA, either because they really don’t like it or because, like many Americans, they don’t understand it.
Culture of Truth
South Lake tahoe, Calif. (AP) – Witnesses say a three-story yacht that recently sold for
$3.2 million has sunk in a Lake Tahoe marina.
A big screen TV, leather couches, and floating slices of bread could be seen inside
the partially submerged yacht Monday.
The vessel includes three bedrooms, three bathrooms,
fireplaces, and a helicopter pad on top.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
US Doctors make substantially more than their overseas counterparts. So where do all these Dr Galts intend to go?
Good luck making your yacht payments on what the UK or Costa Rica will pay you.
JGabriel
Guardian via scav: PFGBest founder ‘attempts suicide as $200m goes missing from accounts’
You would think that after Lehman, and MF Global, and now PFGBest, that the investor class would want more gov’t regulation of banks and brokerages, not less. After all, they are often the ones getting screwed by crooked banksters and brokers.
.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
This is the same tactic they use for many arguments, like raising the minimum wage. “If you raise the minimum wage then some employers will have to lay off some workers…and you might be one of those whose laid off” is similar to “if you enact Obamacare then some doctors will quit…and one of those doctors might be yours!”
They try to turn middle class folks against each other counting on people to always try to save their own skin.
reflectionephemeral
You think they’re so dumb, you think they’re so funny, wait until they got you running to the night rally.
Seems to me to be the most a propos quote from that album. They’re not really only going thru the motions, and as you point out, the media won’t bother to call it out (accurately report the news).
Davis X. Machina
@Percysowner: This is an argument for an NHS-style UK model health care delivery system.
Although I don’t exactly feel overpaid, as a public school teacher I don’t have cut a check to lease my classroom, chip in to hire lunch ladies, take time off to price copy paper and internet service, etc. etc.
The state owns the bricks and mortar, and does all of that stuff, and — occasionally — is responsive to the complaints of the professionals, and their clients.
It’s not a perfect model, but it has its advantages. We’re seeing the death of private, and even group, medical practice anyways, as MD’s are more and more employees of hospitals and such. The PPACA’s preference for ACO’s is all of a piece with that.
dmsilev
OT: Joe Biden addressing a Latino group:
““Mitt Romney wants you to show your papers,” Biden plans to say, according to prepared remarks. “But he won’t show us his.””
Frankensteinbeck
@Brian R.:
Yeah, but Obama screws them. They thought they could throw up a mandate and pretend to fix the problem while shoveling huge amounts of money at insurance companies. Obama piled on two thousand pages of regulations and a system that uses the mandate to force insurance companies to compete on the government’s terms. He took their idea, then made it do exactly what they never, ever wanted. Is it any wonder he drives even the cagey power brokers in the GOP to frothing madness?
Chris
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Ha. For once lower salaries in other countries are helping us.
Culture of Truth
@Percysowner: Plus the ACA is keeping private insurance, so I’m not certain what her problem is.
She wants to more money. Good luck with the GOP.
Rafer Janders
@Culture of Truth:
Oh no! Did it have any guests who couldn’t get into The American Hotel in Sag Harbor in it?
Abijah L.
The president of the American College of Physicians (internal medicine) put out a statement “strongly” supporting the ACA last week. Here in Orange county, California, birthplace of much wingnuttery, I have a couple of colleagues who are opposed to the ACA because they are hyper-Republican, but the non-political types favor the law. I am just retired from a large primary care group which takes a pretty sizable number of MediCal (California Medicaid) patients.
bemused
@BGinCHI:
The AMA is akin to the US Chamber of Commerce. Docs who went into medicine for reasons other than money don’t join the AMA.
amk
@Brian R.:
Bingo
The media are the real enemies of the republic.
RaflW
Sure, they’ll believe 83% of doctors may go Galt. Or non-specific “death panel” boygeymen.
And yet, when Romney’s plan to royally screw the middle class was told to focus groups, they didn’t believe he could be that mean.
Something is really fucked up in the American psyche.
Linda Featheringill
Most physicians will tolerate a lot before they go Galt. A lot more than mere money. Or personal safety for that matter. So that claim is unbelievable on those grounds.
And I will guarantee you that Obamacare is not more complex than the obfuscation insurance companies have been throwing up for years. So any new red tape won’t send the docs out the door, screaming with frustration.
I don’t believe you, guys. Sorry. I award that report four Pinocchios.
ericblair
@dmsilev:
I like this man. Even (especially?) when he screws up you can see he’s a passionate mensch.
Anybody start punking tripadvisor? I haven’t looked yet, but I’d assume so.
scav
@Culture of Truth: Any sign of a Miramax executive without a hotel room?
ETA: Damn! Not fast enough!
David Hunt
@Rafer Janders:
I don’t think that there’s a serious plan to quit in any fashion, but for those that did seriously consider it, I expect the plan would be to stop being doctors in the U.S. There’d probably be some poorly thought out “plan” of going to practice in some other country with first rate medical facilities and no “socialized medicine.” I don’t know what country would meet those criteria and still be a place a moderately well-off asshole would want to live.* Maybe Singpore.
*There’s loads of places where the world is your oyster if you’re rich, because rich people can always get walled compounds and whatnot. People who are just well-off are great targets for the kidnap-for-ransom industry.
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
Most people in general will tolerate a lot. It’s one reason the GOP has gotten away with so much.
Rafer Janders
@RaflW:
This is a problem I often have when discussing politics with less-politically aware friends and colleagues. When I mention a Repubican position or platform, they often don’t believe me or accuse me of hyperbole, because they just can’t believe that I’m accurately representing what conservatives want to do.
It’s brilliant, actually — become so cartoonishly evil that it is its own defense, because normal people will refuse to accept the fact that you would be so cartoonishly evil.
Culture of Truth
no one was hurt when the yacht sunk – the big tv was not so lucky.
slim's tuna provider
@amk: there is so much complaining about the media on this site and no discussion on how to fix it other than the usual “tumbrels” creeps. i am no expert, but while the sins of the current media are many, it strikes me that the old-timey media is not blameless. for example, i know for a fact western journalists wussed out of reporting the ukrainian famine in the 30s, which some of them eye-witnessed. i don’t recall the mainstream media covered themselves in glory in vietnam and korean wars, though i am ready to be corrected. if anyone has any ideas on how to report the “right way” and still succeed in 2012, i challenge you to post them. can there be more than one rachel maddow? is jon stewart really a successful progressive media voice or just a brilliant court jester?
Rafer Janders
@David Hunt:
Nope, not Singapore. It has a form of socialized medicine. The truth is, virtually every advanced economy in the world other than us has some type of socialized medicine.
jrg
I wonder how many of these fragile snowflakes think the problem with GenX is the fact we were told we’re all special.
Have the fuck at it, you clowns. The world needs ditch diggers, too.
Linnaeus
@Rafer Janders:
I realize I may be walking into dangerous territory here, but this looks very similar to Adolf Hitler’s thesis of the Big Lie – the Big Lie works because people simply refuse to believe that someone would dare to lie so audaciously.
gogol's wife
@Butch:
That is a fantastic book. I love the part about “Sky King.”
jibeaux
Because if there’s one thing doctors hate, it’s people with insurance, all right.
DougJ
@reflectionephemeral:
Huh, that’s not on my copy of This Year’s Model. They really screwed around with various releases of that one.
Awesome record, though!
Maude
@slim’s tuna provider:
Who, what, where, when, how and why.
gogol's wife
My GP was all for the ACA.
RSA
I don’t know much about survey methodology, but I do know that surveys need to take a representative sample of the population. Here are a few demographic summaries of surveyed doctors in the report: 59% have been practicing for more than 20 years; 81% are in a solo/small practice; 89% are in an office-based practice.
For contrast on these points, only 39% of direct patient care physicians have practiced 20 years or more; only about a third are in solo or two-physician practices; and less than half (if I’m interpreting the text correctly) work in office-based practices.
So you have to wonder… Well, no, you don’t.
Culture of Truth
Conservatives have the same problem. Almost no one believes them when they insist Obama is going to take their guns and give them to black panthers on ‘Change The National Anthem Day’
Another Halocene Human
@Percysowner: The gov is trying to lower Medicare payments or at least hold down the line. They are also pushing to stop paying so much for worthless surgeries. This has been a problem for a while not least of all from a patient care perspective, but unfortunately a lot of doctors are more worried about money than their duty to their patients.
We used to joke about boats and their kid’s college fees, but today the big issue is that unless you were already hyperrich (in which case, why work that hard through med school and all that), you’re leaving school with INSANE student loans. Even the most motivated and idealistic find themselves forced to go into a specialty and work crazy hours to stay afloat. I’m sure there are some outs for some people–for example, vets can get their bills paid by the gov’t if they do large animal work for a certain # of years–but most are just stuck with it.
Something needs to be done to rein these graduate schools in. The saddest thing is that despite all the money they aren’t delivering the absolute best in education. The system is rife with absurdities that date to a different era… oh, and that “residency” bullshit (not actually resident any more) is hurting and KILLING patients, but the old farts refuse to cut their junior doctors in training down to human-sized hours.
Residents are often involved in deadly traffic collisions–maybe that will make people outraged b/c they sure as hell don’t seem to care about mistakes made during emergency care.
Abijah L.
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Nah, not if you look at the actual numbers. For instance, the average primary care doc in Germany makes 3.2 times the average German household income while the U.S. primary care doc makes about 3.5 times the average U.S. household income. A couple of years ago I was talking to my husband’s old dissertation advisor. His daughter was slightly out earning me as a primary care doc — working for the NHS in Cardiff, Wales.
If you take into account the fact that we have a higher percentage of specialists than Europe and a higher household income than Europe, then salaries between physicians in the U.S. and Europe are actually pretty much the same. Of course, in the U.S. we also have a much higher (and rising!) Gini coefficient which would tend to push professional salaries up even more.
Physician compensation only accounts for about 10-11% of medical care costs anyway, so quit bagging on us. My tech exec husband has been out earning me 2:1 for years. M.D. compensation is very nice, but most of us are still 99%ers.
Also, just for comparison purposes, the AMA has generally skewed specialist, southern, white, and male and they still support the ACA.
Another Halocene Human
I should add that most of the doctors I know are research MDs… FWIW. Sadly, I feel like most of them have better social skills than the “people doctors” but that lure of status used to be a strange attractor for assholes. I think assholes are all about venture capital/web 2.0 these days (and going for that sweet, sweet wingnut welfare), but I could be wrong.
Rafer Janders
@Linnaeus:
See Romney, Mitt.
amk
@slim’s tuna provider: The times are different now. The people who can ‘complain’ about the msm now in public forums and hold them accountable.You should see the defensive tweets from hacks like chuck todd and jake tapper when they are taken to task in twitterdom. So do your part of ‘complaining’. How do you think rachel maddow happened ? By popular demand in blogs, not by corporate msnbc
Dan
The response rate for the survey was under 5%. They found fax numbers for 36k doctor offices, and faxed out over 16k faxes. They got back 699 surveys.
This is about the worst survey methodology you could come up with. They do not have any comparison of the demographic that answered to the demographic of doctor’s as a whole.
Another Halocene Human
@JGabriel: You would think that after Lehman, and MF Global, and now PFGBest, that the investor class would want more gov’t regulation of banks and brokerages, not less. After all, they are often the ones getting screwed by crooked banksters and brokers.
When I was hanging around online with the investor class (they have cooties, btw, took a while to purify myself) they actually are livid about all of this. They are also like 3-5% of the population and due to their habit of looking down on everyone (=kulaks) they can’t leverage that into any real political power. They were protesting during the waning days of the Bush admin and were the original core of the Tea Party (though abruptly pushed out). Many of them were quite delusional and in love with “Doctor Paul”. Others tried to translate their anger into political action but it’s tough when you have a forum full of parasites and selfish pricks. The major fail was failing to communicate any of this to liberals in a timely fashion… OWS happened years after the theft was going on, a bit late, I think. (To be fair, I’m glad people woke up.)
I haven’t been on their forums in a while. Dipped my toe in, some defend Obama, after all he is a liberal Republican like them; some furious with him because on finance he has been awful, kept Geithner around, brought in Summers, etc; some just hate Obama because they’re racists or they hate all Democrats and blame them for everything. Btw, there are a lot of racists among the “fiscal conservatives”. And Jew-haters/baiters. Sorry, that’s just truth.
Fiscal conservatives have no actual power in the Republican party. Some of them can been fooled into voting for them time and again, though, as if the GWB years weren’t enough to set them straight.
But yeah, there are a lot of investors who are pissed. If you have 1.4$ mill or whatever you are a “little guy” with no power whatsoever, open season on you by Wall Street. More truth. Sorry.
reflectionephemeral
@DougJ: Huh, yeah, it was the last “official” track on the Rykodisc one I had in high schoo. It was, followed by a 10-second pause before Radio Radio, which I guess they deemed not properly on TYM. I guess there’s no One True Version of that album, tho, not even the one I first knew of…
rlrr
@Culture of Truth:
I have no problem with people owning yachts, but a boat that size on lake with no access to the ocean is just insane…
NonyNony
@RSA:
The solo/dual doctor practices around here have almost all folded. The younger doctors work as employees of the local hospital system, and their offices are part of that system.
It’s interesting. In the 90s, when I would talk to doctors about politics at all, they were hard-and-fast against any kind of socialized medicine. And they had their own private practices to support. These days the doctors I talk to are overworked employees of a bureaucratic hospital system and they support single payer – a few in the practice will even tell me they wish we would go full-on NHS!
rlrr
@Rafer Janders:
Also, Singapore is full of foreigners.
Jebediah
@slim’s tuna provider:
Going back to pre-Reagan media ownership rules would be a start. There are far too few (and thus too large) media owners these days. Equal-time requirements might also help.
Cris (without an H)
He always reminded me more of Brezhnev — as the head of a major military superpower, he had the power to cause a lot of damage, but at heart was no more than a self-interested petty bureaucrat. Oversaw economic decline while sending his country’s army into a bankrupting quagmire. Wore military regalia he didn’t earn and considered his critics to be enemies of the state. And so on.
TooManyJens
The founder of the DPMA is also the president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which is a Birchite pack of paranoid clowns and quacks. Amusingly, they renamed their journal to the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons a while back, but abbreviate it as JP&S because I guess somebody finally pointed out that calling it JAPS wasn’t such a hot idea. Whatever it’s called, it’s widely considered a joke. Also, Andrew Schlafly of Conservapedia infamy is their legal expert.
So, yeah, I totally trust their president as a reliable source.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: Yeah, I originally got that song on “Taking Liberties.”
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: Yeah, I originally got that song on “Taking Liberties.”
slim's tuna provider
@Maude: huh? how would you report the ACA under that model? how would you fill 24 hours of airwaves?
Johnny B. Good
I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of doctors agreed with this position. But, if Obamacare is overturned, let’s see how many doctors love 100 million or more Americans dropping health coverage and not going to get their services. The AMA is partly responsible for creating this mess Let them try to explain to us why we need to pay exorbinant fees to go see them when we don’t have health insurance.
slim's tuna provider
@amk: yes, but the model hasn’t changed one bit.
TooManyJens
Holy shit, did anyone click through to the actual report from the DPMA? (edit: er, yes, RSA did)
They sent out faxes to 36,000 doctors, of which 16,227 were actually delivered and they got 669 replies. So, they got a 4.3% response rate on their survey. And instead of concluding that only the absolutely most pissed-off and motivated people bothered to reply to their fax spam, they’re claiming that the results are representative of all doctors nationwide. Sure, that’s credible.
someofparts
They don’t care about truth because it doesn’t matter for their game plan. They don’t expect to be believed. They just do it to sow doubt about people like us. People who don’t follow events as assiduously as some of us here respond to wingnut lies by deciding that ALL of us are liars. That leaves those people still not believing the wingnuts, but also, not trusting us either. That’s the point for the wingers, and it seems to work.
SenyorDave
My brother is a doctor married to a doctor. Together they make upwards of $1.5M. He supports single payer. He’s not sure if he would have supported it 20 years ago when he was first starting to make real money. He believes he is the last generation of doctrs who can easily make half a million a year, becasue he is sure of two things:
Single payer is coming
SP will lower doctors oicome.
Calouste
@Roger Moore:
The shame was probably the idea that he would be poor for the rest of his life, rather than the shame about making $200 million of other people’s money disappear.
reflectionephemeral
@Omnes Omnibus: From Wiki: “The US release on Columbia, two months after the original UK release, dropped “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” and “Night Rally” (reportedly as being “too English”) and added “Radio Radio” to close side two.”
I was thinking of the early 90s Rykodisc reissue, which I guess tried to be faithful to the original release, not the US version.
Heliopause
My god, that would be a great thing if true. We’d have to import a ton of doctors from lower wage countries and that would be a good down payment on our long-run fiscal problems. Can’t the righties be correct just this once?
CA Doc
Late to thread because I haven’t gone Galt, and well over 50% of today’s patients are Medicare or Medicaid, which suits me just fine.
Most of the major physician groups supported the ACA. In primary care, probably 50% support moving onward to a single payer system. So this “survey” is BS. That’s not to say that there isn’t a loud obnoxious subpopulation of the physician community that is of the libertarian, IGMFU stripe. Those folks know their cash cow is slowly dying, and they are pissed!
Patricia Kayden
@donovong: Did any of the reporters/journalists challenge her, i.e., ask her where she got her facts?
The media needs to ask for the source of these “facts”. If it’s from Drudge or some other rightwing rag, it can be rightfully disregarded. Remember Breitbart and the Sherrod scandal.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Abijah L.:
I’m going by articles like this one.
According to that, Dr’s salaries in the US trend high, even when you take the generally higher wealth of the country (in GDP:captia) into account.
Female on the Beach
Did he ever update his site or does it still look exactly as it did in 1996?
Jay in Oregon
@Rafer Janders:
Well, unless you’re a Democrat; then every move you make is proof of some Byzantine conspiracy. Remember, Obama making no overtures towards enacting stricter gun control laws is PROOF that he wants to take your guns away!
trollhattan
@Culture of Truth:
Was wondering how one would transport a giant yacht to Tahoe, but will guess it was assembled by out-of-work contractors atop a barge. Looks like a stack of double-wides.
http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/article/20060823/NEWS/108230056
Chris
@Heliopause:
This!
That’s the thing the righties don’t get about going Galt: they’re just as replaceable as anyone else. MOTU want to go on strike? Oh, please go ahead. Somewhere in your organization are dozens of people who’d be thrilled to do your job for a slightly higher tax rate.
Female on the Beach
Also, the tactic is to just drown people in lies, wave after wave of them, so that all their time and energy is consumed with researching and refuting the deluge of lies. It’s not the quality of the lie, it’s the quantity.
Female on the Beach
@CA Doc: If only I could become as indignant about losing 2/3 of my paltry salary over the last 5 years due to the economy!
Downpuppy
@Dan: Worst method? Depends on what you’re trying to do. If the object is to sell your notions as being representative of all doctors (to people who won’t click through), it couldn’t have been slicker.
The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered. Doctors were asked to return their completed surveys by fax, or online at a web address included in the faxed copy. Browser rules prevented doctors from filing duplicate surveys, and respondents were asked to provide personal identification for verification. The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys.
Chris
@Female on the Beach:
Yep.
Like I said in a recent thread, our perception of reality is as warped as that of the Soviets and for exactly the same reason – decades of lies upon lies replaced with more lies and other lies superseding the more lies, until we don’t know how to find our way to truth even if we wanted to.
If the movement conservative bubble ever finally bursts, I’m not sure there’ll be anyone left on our elites who’ll know how to repair the system.
jprfrog
I just looked at the DPMA website and the “survey”. I wanted to check not the “results” but the questions. Since the way questions are stated has a considerable influence on the answers. Would you believe…
No questions!
Just an “open-ended” invitation to kvetch, which would gather the same result from almost any professional group (even hockey players). I know this because I was shown some years ago the results of a professionally done survey of various professionals’ job-satisfaction, with special attention from my own narrow area (symphony musicians in the US, Canada, and the then 2 Germanys). We were right up there in dissatisfaction along with commercial airline pilots (and hockey players!). But I would bet a year’s pension payment that inviting any bunch of musicians to kvetch would get more like 95% to say they have thought about quitting (I did so about twice a week for 40 years). But few do.
Because (a) like medicine if it is done well it is a calling, not a job, and you don’t walk away from a calling (b) both require many more years of training and experience and it is equally hard to walk away from such an enormous investment, especially the emotional part and (c) while medical professionals make a lot more, any musician with a decent situation will know that doing what he does will be more natural and easier than retraining (say, in one’s 50’s) and to do what? Where will a surgeon (or symphony bassoonist) find a place to use his skills, and be paid for it?
Shorter version: the “survey” is such BS that it should be sent to the pathologist for screening.
PS My brother has been a successful physician for almost 50 years and for him the major ass-ache is the insurance companies.
FlipYrWhig
In another alarming survey finding, 83% of middle children have considered holding their breath until they turn blue because that’ll show ’em who’s not going to be overlooked around here EVER AGAIN!
Female on the Beach
@jprfrog: You guys did something that never occurred to those people forwarding stupid emails and posting stupid stuff on message boards, you READ the damned thing!
Filthy liberals
rikyrah
they are fucking crazy
Another Halocene Human
@rlrr: big yachts actually suck as a national economic program, so to the extent that they represent waste rather than investment in a strong, functional, fair and sustainable economy, I do so have an issue with people owning/purchasing/commissioning really big yachts.
twiffer
yes, 83 is certainly more specific than 80. 80 is just so vague. sounds made up if you use an even number or a multiple of 5.
karen
I used to see these doctors until they moved to this form this practice. I saw them until they no longer took insurance. After that, even though I loved them, I couldn’t afford to see them anymore. That was four or five years ago.
Today I get this packet in the mail that this practice now has a new membership program called “Privia.” For the low price of $45 a month (which will rise when their program fills up) I can have access to doctors, email them, speak with them on the phone, etc.
Maybe $45 a month doesn’t seem like a lot to some of you but that’s $540 in addition to the doctor bills that are not covered by insurance and as I read about some of the “perks” I got more and more angry. Basically, you’re paying $45 to be treated decently, something that used to be a given with doctors. I realize that I’m lucky to be employed and have insurance. For the people who can’t afford this membership fee, who are not employed or who are employed who don’t have insurance, this just rubs in the fact that they may not get “good” doctors, good treatment and be treated well. So we’re already rationing health care and if the people who can’t afford it get cancer or any other expensive major disease, they might as well just accept the fact that they will die. Period, the end.
jprfrog
If I had to choose between government bureaucrats who have at least a notional commitment to my welfare, or private insurance company bureaucrats whose entire commitment is to profit, which one will probably do better for me?
Anyway, the ACA (and Medicare, which I am now ancient enough to be covered by) don’t pose that choice, in spite of what Rush spews.
Rathskeller
for a n=1 sample, I have my father-in-law, who is a primary care physician in Massachusetts. he visited recently. As a political type, I was mildly frustrated because he was totally uninterested in talking about ACA. he doesn’t think it will have any major effect on his practice. And he’s not walled off: he takes in new patients, and a large fraction of his patients are on medicare.
Egypt Steve
Hey, I think I was that anonymous Daily Kos commentator. And I’d do it again.
gene108
@Another Halocene Human:
One more reason they don’t want government regulation is the rewards outweigh the risk.
The hedge funds and other investment options, like getting shares of an IPO before it becomes publicly traded, for the “sophisticated investor”, i.e. those with over $1 million to play with, means the returns they can get far and away exceed what we can get on the retail brokerage side.
The upside to what they can make outweighs whatever risks are there from Lehman, MF Global and this operation in Iowa.
mai naem
By all means, please let them go Galt. Go find a job elsewhere. I didn’t realize doctors were such delicate flowers that had to be pampered and mollycoddled. My mom’s on old fashioned medicare and there has never been an issue getting her into any doctor. Zero. Furthermore, she generally gets in within a week. Now, medicaid and other managed care insurances is a different matter and even with that,it’s usually an issue with getting authorization not with getting the doctor. There used to be a shortage of endocrinologists in our area but no more. As far as I know, the only shortage I know of is of infectious disease specialists and most of them seem to be foreign school grads.
Bruce S
“The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered. Doctors were asked to return their completed surveys by fax, or online at a web address included in the faxed copy. Browser rules prevented doctors from filing duplicate surveys, and respondents were asked to provide personal identification for verification. The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys.”
This isn’t even close to a legitimate survey construction. It’s jerry-rigged to attract the attention of the disgruntled few and an indifferent shrug from normal doctors who don’t have time or inclination to respond to random faxes from dubious groups. The minimal response rate is proof of how contrived and worthless this “survey” is.
RSA
@NonyNony:
I’ve heard consistent stories from people I’ve talked to in healthcare IT in my area. It’s hard to make it work. It doesn’t help that the pediatricians and GPs are at the bottom of the salary scale among physicians, pulling in $150K a year, about 40% of what high-end specialists do. That is, that’s great money, but there’s a huge incentive for physicians to specialize. Among OECD countries we’re around the 30th percentile in doctors per capita, but we’re near the bottom of the list in the percentage of those doctors that are GPs: 12.3%.
Abijah L.
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Yep, there is a lot of income inequality in the U.S. If you are a professional, you are being payed better than your European counterparts. Read the previous article by Uwe Reinhardt. Provider compensation is 10% of total spending. Slashing provider income wouldn’t help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
Abijah L.
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Yep, there is a lot of income inequality in the U.S. If you are a professional, you are being payed better than your European counterparts. Read the previous article by Uwe Reinhardt. Provider compensation is 10% of total spending. Slashing provider income wouldn’t help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
lorimakesquilts
That survey is a load of shit:
* They don’t say where they got the names from, which is enough to invalidate it right there.
* The age demographics don’t appear to be representative of MDs in the U.S., greatly under-representing younger doctors. They don’t report age, but assuming approximately 12 years of education/training is necessary to begin practicing, age 30 would be about the age one starts a practice. According to the Federation of State Medical Boards about 1/4 of all doctors are less 40 years old, i.e., less than 10 years in practice. Only 8% of the respondents had less than 10 years in practice. Nearly 70% of those surveyed were 50 or older, while about 50% of the total population are 50 or older.
*Geographic location demos are also a bit suspect. They don’t specify the particular states so it’s hard to make a direct comparison, but it appears that the Northeast and the West are under-represented, while the South and Midwest are over-represented.
http://www.fsmb.org/pdf/pub-journal-census.pdf
*And then there’s the questions. I’m not a market research professional but I’ve hired enough of ’em and directed them for the companies I’ve worked for several times so I can tell the difference between a good question and bad, i.e., biased, question. And these are bad. Leading, so general that they could be interpreted in multiple ways, etc., etc.
I didn’t even bother with their analysis, no doubt it’s as biased as the survey itself.
Lojasmo
Every single cardiologist I work with is going to work at mcDonald’s because of Obamacare…not.
Bruce S
Rick Tyler – a GOPer hack who worked on Gingrich’s genius campaign – was spreading this idiocy as “fact” on this morning’s Janseng & Co, and of course he didn’t get called out as either a malicious liar or a total moron for it. The crap just sat there in a steaming pile.
Bruce S
@Lojasmo:
I don’t know – it’s pretty hard to get a job at McDonald’s these days.
The Lodger
@nipsip:
Syntax: Sin or Tax?