Quote:
Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
Too bad we don't have groups doing the same in the US, if you are a poor American good luck getting first rate medical care...  |
The poor get excellent medical care in the US. Docs are forced to take medicaid patients to have privileges at hospitals. Docs treat them no differently than anyone else, heck, they often don't even know the insurance status. Even if they did, fear of being sued (the poor patients do like to sue, after all) means the incentive is also to treat them the same.
Standard of care is standard of care.
BTW, docs frequently pay money out of pocket for every medicaid patient they see. They cannot write off the in-kind contribution, or even the LOSS that seeing them entails (if the per-patient visit overhead is $34 and Medicaid pays $22, the doc loses $12 per patient—so the doc's time is worth negative $/hour).