Saturday, June 28, 2008

Doctors vs. Health Care

By Paul Gessing

Categories: Illinois

The Chicago Tribune has an excellent editorial in today's paper about efforts by the Illinois State Medical Society to eliminate competition in the form of clinics which are staffed by by nurse practitioners.

The legislation which is now introduced in the Legislature would:

• Ban health-care facilities from opening in any store that also sells alcohol or tobacco. Well, there go Wal-Mart, Walgreens and CVS/Caremark as locations for the clinics.

• Require separate restrooms and a "designated receptionist and waiting area." Both would raise the infrastructure costs of many retail clinics to the point that they would no longer make economic sense.

• Ban advertising of fee comparisons and require that no doctor can supervise more than two clinics.

• Set stiffer regulatory requirements for retail clinics than for more traditional health-care operations.

Preserving monopolies through the government is a nasty thing and these efforts, if successful, will only force patients to pay more for care.