Sen. John McCain in his speech Sept. 4 accepting the Republican Party's presidential nomination:
My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.
Does any thinking person really believe there is no bureaucracy already in place between them and their doctor? In his speech, McCain trotted out the usual GOP scare tactic about socialized medicine. The truth lies elsewhere, as the Toledo (Ohio) Blade documents in a recent investigative series.
The series is titled "Not What the Doctor Ordered."
The Blade's investigative team set out to examine whether patients are getting the care their doctors ordered. We found some people with health insurance were harmed because insurers interfered. Whether prescriptions, medical tests, or surgery, dozens of doctors told The Blade insurers overruled their decisions, and patients suffered.
We cast a wide net in conducting this investigation, interviewing about 100 doctors in a dozen states and surveying hundreds more about their experiences with insurers. We spoke to insurance executives, health care lawyers, academics, and lawmakers.
Most important, we spoke to patients.
If you think that, since all men and women are created equal, you get the same access and health care that a U.S. senator and multimillionaire like John McCain gets, you would be wrong. Do you imagine that he waits three or four months to get in to see a specialist for whatever is ailing him?
And you would be absolutely wrong to think that no bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor (but you already knew that, being a thinking person). From the series:
When a patient steps into a doctor’s office, he trusts that the only thing on his physician’s mind is how to make him better.
But physicians across the United States fear that increasingly stringent insurance rules and the frequent second-guessing of doctors’ orders are eroding the doctor-patient relationship.
A Blade investigation, including interviews with about 100 physicians and a national survey of doctors with more than 900 responses, revealed that a growing number of doctors believe there’s an epidemic of insurers dictating medical-treatment decisions.
"An epidemic of insurers." Let's add that to the collective noun list like "gaggle of geese" and "pride of lions" (maybe better: "a shame of insurers").