Doctors are sick of Obamacare

Well, Obama can surely not count on doctors to back him in his re-election bid. Huffington Post’s Harry Bradford posted on October 2 that:

More than half of physicians say they’ll vote for Mitt Romney come November 6th compared to just 36 percent for Obama, according to a recent survey by medical staffing firm Jackson and Cokey. In fact, 15 percent of survey respondents said they’ll be switching to the Republican camp this election, with most citing the Affordable Care Act as the reason.

The majority of the 3,660 doctors polled in the survey said they also are in favor of repealing and replacing Obama’s signature piece of legislation because it failed to address tort reform, an issue relating regulations surrounding malpractice lawsuits.

It’s not just doctors that aren’t pleased with Obamacare, however. Other critics include the food service industry, which fears the law may adversely affect restaurants’ ability to maintain slim profit margins since it requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide affordable health insurance. In August, Papa John’s pizza CEO John Schnatter said that at least some of those extra costs would be passed on to the customer.

Furthermore, Betsi Fores at Daily Caller also wrote on October 1 that “if the election were held today, 55 percent of physicians reported they would vote for Romney while just 36 percent support Obama…fifteen percent of respondents said they were switching their vote from Obama in 2008 to Romney in 2012. The top reasons cited for this change was the Affordable Care Act and the failure to address tort reform.”  Jackson and Cokey is a subsidiary of Jackson Healthcare, which is the third largest health care staffing company in the United States.

As The Economist noted in February of this year, “every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.”  If I were a doctor – I wouldn’t want my kid entering this profession either.

It seems that is also the growing consensus in the medical community.   Dr. Marc Siegel wrote on Fox News on October 1 that physicians are becoming incrementally pessimistic about the future of medicine in this country.  He reported that in “a new on-line survey by the non-profit The Physicians Foundation, one of the largest doctors surveys ever performed, confirms that over two thirds of physicians are pessimistic about the future of medicine, over 84 percent feel that our profession is in decline, and a majority would not recommend it as a career for their children. (The survey was sent to over 600,000 doctors and over 14,000 responded).”

He also alluded to the fact that doctors are “underpaid, ill-equipped, and overburdened.”  To put it simply, they’re unprepared for the federally mandated expansion Obamacare will bring to American medicine.  Furthermore, they;re struggling to care for the patients they have at the present time.

Concerning the amount of paperwork doctors file, as alluded in The Economist, it’s no wonder that they “are exhausted.”   Siegel stated that “we [doctors] simple can’t handle all the paperwork or the growing list of medical problems presented to us by the chronically ill. This loss of man hours comes at a time when ObamaCare is expanding the entitlement and we are already faced with a physician shortage which will reach 160,000 by 2025, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. This patient expansion is taking place while we, doctors, are contracting — it is a perfect storm.”

In all, this bill – which will soon represent the largest tax hike in American history – has disillusioned doctors and almost half the country.  As President Obama goes cross-country slamming Romney for his 47% remarks, he should keep in mind that he’s already written off half of the nation’s concerns concerning this unconstitutional and intrusive piece of legislation.

Crossposted at Hot Air.