Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Choice
We have to get past this idea that free choice of physician
is some kind of inalienable right.
When we move to another town far away we change
physicians. When our physicians die or
retire, we change. If we are in an HMO
and our physician goes to work somewhere else, we change. When wife Marilyn got her second knee, the
surgeon who did the first one was no longer doing them and referred her to
another one. In none of those cases do
we complain.
But if an insurance company asks us to change, we cry
‘foul.’ And “choice” remains a favorite
word for inclusion in health insurance advertisements.
All of that was brought to mind by an article in the June 7
issue of The Boston Globe titled Mass.
Seniors lose choices on doctors. It
seems that UnitedHealthcare has announced its intention to remove up to 700 physicians
from the Massachusetts panel of 16,800 that it has offered to subscribers of
its Medicare Advantage health insurance plans.
The rather long article discussed various aspects of the
issue, but on the subject of why UnitedHealthcare would risk alienating a group
of its subscribers by making them change physicians, it only quoted the company
as saying it was doing it to reduce cost and, perhaps, improve quality.
One has to assume that the doctors being dropped were
practicing in a way that was unusually costly and, perhaps, not of the best
quality.
Maybe people ought to appreciate learning that the
physicians they have been using are not very good, but that is a lot to
ask. It would be better if they got the
information from some source other than their insurance companies, but at
present that seems to be the main one.
