Americans from all walks of life have a story to tell about the difficulties a tough medical diagnoses has brought on, or their struggles with paying medical bills.  I do not deny that reforms are needed, but Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats have simply put forth the wrong kind of reform. 

You don’t make insurance more affordable by making it more expensive.  Families will not benefit from higher taxes.  Struggling small businesses will find it more difficult to afford employer-sponsored health insurance for their employees with new federal mandates and costly penalties for non-compliance.  Seniors who have paid into the Medicare system for decades will see their benefits decrease.  This is not health care reform.

Despite the monstrous size of the bill, the Democrats’ health care plan continues to leave out huge aspects of health care reform.  Medicare doctors are facing a 20 percent cut in payments, yet nothing in today’s announced plan addresses this issue.  Medical liability reform, which has greatly improved access to health care and lowered costs in Texas, is completely missing.

Furthermore, the process leading up to today in the House of Representatives has been the most secretive and opaque since I was elected to Congress in 2002.  House Republicans, including the thirteen of us who are medical professionals, were denied the opportunity to participate in the legislative process from the beginning, despite our continued efforts to provide real ideas for meaningful reform based on our years of experience.  Democrats have completely ignored the millions of Americans who voiced their strong opposition to a government takeover of America’s health care system by pushing ahead with a ‘public option’ and a drastic expansion of Medicaid. 

• Enacting Meaningful medical liability reform
• Respecting Americans' attitudes towards abortion
• Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse from existing programs
• Ensuring continued access to physicians and hospitals for Americans
• Guaranteeing choice in health coverage

Three American scientists were awarded a Nobel Prize on Monday for discovering how cells protect their genetic material as they divide repeatedly throughout an organism's life, a crucial discovery with fundamental implications for research on aging, cancer and other issues.

"As many citizens can attest, the U.S. is a great place to get sick, but a terrible place to stay well. This requires a shift in the way both doctors and patients approach health maintenance and disease prevention. We have a unique opportunity in healthcare reform to decrease costs through health maintenance and wellness, as opposed to when we get sick down the road and incur more costly expenditures through treatment.

Click here to read the rest.

Patients in Alaska, particularly in large urban areas, are having a hard time finding primary care physicians who will accept Medicare, according to a survey done by the Institute of Social and Economic Research. 20% of the doctors surveyed in Anchorage will not see patients with Medicare unless the patient agrees to pay the bill themselves.  In their article “How Hard Is It for Alaska’s Medicare Patients to Find Family Doctors?” Rosyland Frazier and Mark Foster report that Medicare will only pay two-thirds on average of what a private insurer would pay for the same doctor visit.  Alaskan state senators have made progress increasing what doctors will be reimbursed from Medicare, but it has not yet made a significant difference in the amount of doctors who accept new patients in the program.

“Recent national surveys sponsored by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found that 17% of Medicare patients in the U.S. had “a big problem” finding family doctors in 2007, up from 13% in 2005. Alaska may be the harbinger of a national trend.”

An increasing number of Medicare patients in Alaska are choosing to go to federally funded clinics, such as the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center, where they can be sure a doctor will accept Medicare.  Some places, however, such as the Alaska Family Medicine Residency Program, have capped the number of Medicare patients they will accept, leaving these patients with even fewer options.  A total of 13 doctors treat Anchorage’s total new Medicare patient population, with five of those doctors working at the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center.

With a growing population of Alaskans using Medicare, the problem of finding doctors who accept new patients continues to grow as well.  This trend is felt nationwide with more citizens eligible for Medicare and a decreasing number of doctors to treat them.

For more on the problem and what should be done about it, click here.