Let Washington Control Our Healthcare?

From Bloomberg News:

Obama and his allies in Congress are pushing to extend coverage to the 46 million Americans without health insurance, at a potential cost of $1 trillion over a decade. The separate Medicare proposal, announced July 1, slashes projected spending for care by cardiologists and oncologists by more than 10 percent each, while paying family doctors 8 percent more and nurses an additional 7 percent.

The cuts would be “impossible” for some small-town cardiologists who rely on Medicare patients, said Zia Roshandel, a heart doctor in Culpeper, Virginia. The town of 10,000 people is about 60 miles southwest of Washington.
Roshandel and two partners see perhaps 50 patients a day at his practice, the local hospital and a community clinic for the indigent, the 40-year-old said in a telephone interview. Medicare accounts for two-thirds of their clientele, he said.
Already squeezed by government and private insurers, Roshandel said he has cut office hours, forgone paychecks and shifted his 12 workers to a high-deductible insurance plan over the past two years. The latest proposal would push him out of private practice altogether, most likely to a hospital in a larger community less reliant on Medicare, he said.
‘Close the Office’
If the proposal stands, “the bottom line is I’m going to close the office,” he said. “This is impossible for me to survive. If my partners and I don’t get a salary and run it for free, maybe then we can survive.”

Read the whole article here.

That's what happens when health care becomes a budget item.