Cavuto Brings On Pediatrician To Fear Monger About Affordable Care Act

On Your World, Neil Cavuto spoke to pediatrician Dr. Arie Friedman about the Affordable Care Act. In case you didn’t have an idea in advance of how the segment would be framed, the headline of the FoxNews.com video gave you a hint: ObamaCare spiraling into ‘worse and worse situation’?

The discussion, which occurred on August 21, 2013, was loosely based on a resolution passed by the Nevada AFL-CIO "ripping" the ACA. After noting, "None of this coming as a surprise" to Friedman, Cavuto asked, “Doctor, what about guys like you? I mean, you treat us, and you have to deal with all the hassles more than unions have to deal with the costs. Do you ever question whether it’s worth it to be a doctor?”

No, he doesn’t. Friedman said, “I don’t think any of us question whether it’s worth being a doctor. My family’s been in medicine for a long time. My grandfather graduated University of Michigan in 1922, and I wanted to always have a practice just like his, and we take this doctor-patient care relationship very seriously.” But, he added, “But as you said, as health care reform gets further and further along, we get further and further away from our patients, that we start working for bean counters and bureaucrats and government regulators, and that relationship is being lost.”

So Cavuto pumped for a bit more criticism. He asked, “I’m curious about where you think this law is going. If so much has been delayed, and now some of its key backers are raising hackles if not defunded, as Republicans want to do, it’s going to be dragged out.”

Friedman complied, saying, “I’ve heard you talk about free market principles, I’m a big fan of yours, and how do you take 16% of the economy, layer on thousands of pages of a law, and tens of thousands of pages of regulation, and have it be anything other than disaster? …As we go along, health care’s going to get more expensive, less efficient, and it’s going to become worse for everybody.”

Cavuto never asked for anything like statistics for that assertion. Maybe that’s because the preliminary data indicates that health insurance premiums are being lowered.

Cavuto closed by saying, perhaps revealing more truth than he intended, “Doctor, it’s why we have guys like you on. We can talk to politicians anytime about this law back and forth and back and forth. Guys like you are on the front lines and trying to just help people.”

Especially if those people hate ObamaCare and don’t need no stinkin’ facts about how it’s working.

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commented 2013-08-24 01:16:29 -0400 · Flag

So, just how does this a-hole deal with all the “bean counters and bureaucrats and government regulators” that he’s had to work with for however long he’s been a pediatrician? Or is this guy basically saying he doesn’t see patients who have insurance and his office works on a “cash-only” basis? Of course, that’s not always a great solution either since, if he’s charging what he considers is a “fair” rate, unless his patients (or, more accurately, their parents) are pretty well-off, they’re going to have to set up payment plans—which means his office is basically going to have its own set of “bean counters and bureaucrats” since someone’s going to have to make sure those bills get collected.

NewsHounds posted about Cavuto Brings On Pediatrician To Fear Monger About Affordable Care Act on NewsHounds' Facebook page 2013-08-23 19:37:11 -0400

We're all gonna die if we all have health insurance!