Obamacare or not, health care remains an endless nightmare. New York State (NYS) is worse than anywhere else. According to wallethub.com, in 2017 NYS has the third lowest wages for physicians, the fourth most competitive market for patients, the highest malpractice insurance rates and the highest malpractice lawsuit awards. 

Obamacare or not, health care remains an endless nightmare. New York State (NYS) is worse than anywhere else. According to wallethub.com, in 2017 NYS has the third lowest wages for physicians, the fourth most competitive market for patients, the highest malpractice insurance rates and the highest malpractice lawsuit awards. According to the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration’s national practitioner data bank, NYS has the second most successful medical malpractice lawsuits and most money paid out in malpractice awards per capita. NYS pays out two and a half rimes more in malpractice awards than California. No wonder health care costs here are insane. It’s time for us to do something about it. 

Every Medicaid and Medicare rescue program launched is fundamentally flawed. The dollars that are supposed to trickle down to provide patients quality health care and pay the worthy providers keeps dwindling down to nothing. The middle men keep sucking the financial blood from medical practices by demanding performance that is impossible to deliver without hiring an army of employees that practices cannot afford. Meanwhile, large hospital systems seek to take over medical practices to patch their leaking boats. It is the same sick cycle of syphoning resources and fighting amongst themselves for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie. 

The medical doctors and medical service providers are in misery. The system cannot exist without them, but they are unprepared, unwilling and hence unable to do anything substantial for themselves or their patients. They get simultaneously intimidated and incentivized; settling too quickly for too little and harming themselves in the process. New Yorkers are aging and doctors are retiring or being kicked out of the system by the regulatory agencies. Insurance companies keep funneling money through their subsidiaries, enforcing inscrutable policies from above with no recourse for medical providers to change things. The only way out of this nightmare is to wake the political will of the medical professionals and unify it with that of patients. We must scream “enough is enough!” My dear Western New Yorkers, we must change the system before it chokes us.