How will the new Patient Protection and Affordable Act Affect Gastroenterologists?

If you have been following this blog, you know that this blog tends to be more of a professional related blog.  Most of the posts are summary reviews of research articles, and this is how this blog will be continued into the future.  However, I do like to mix it up a little bit, and this post will serve as a good example.

Most notably, the entire country right now - especially the entire health care community - is on edge about the Supreme Court's ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which should be released some time later this month most likely.  It is no exaggeration to say that this decision is the most influential one to come down from the Supreme Court since perhaps Bush. vs. Gore back in 2000. And before that decision, you have to go way back to 1972 for the Roe vs. Wae decision to find any decision that has real influence on your typical American. In short, there are few rulings from the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that have any impact on your average American - once every 20 years maybe - but this one definitely does have a major impact on everybody.

I have been following this case extremely closely, and I have absolutely no idea how the court will eventually rule.  The general consensus is that the Obama administration lawyers did not rack it up well in the 3 days of arguments at the end of March against the opposing lawyers.  Particularly, the questions from the 5 conservative judges were rather harsh.  However, given the nature of the case, one would expect tough questions regardless for the PPACA, so you can't put a whole lot of weight on the questions necessarily. The way it breaks down is this: you have 4 justice which will definitely vote to uphold the law, 1 justice who will definitely vote against it, and 4 other conservative leaning justices who could go either way.  The key here is that the Obama administration only needs 1 of those 4 justices to vote for it,  and I have a feeling this will occur - although I am not as confident as I was two months ago before the hearings began.  If I had to guess, I would say there is a 75% chance that the SCOTUS will up-hold the PPACA when the ruling comes out later this month.

But anyway, enough legal rambling, this post will assume that the PPACA will in fact be supported by the SCOTUS.  So, a good question is this: how will this ruling affect your average Joe Gastroenterologist?  A-lot has been written about how it will affect the patient, and this is a good article from the CCFA on the ramifications from a patient's perspective.  

My answer to this question is this: anything that is good for the Gastroenterologist patient is also good for the Gastroenterologist.  Simple and straight forward as this really.  It is no secret that your typical Gastroenterologist patient would probably be prone to be lumped in that group of people who have a "pre-existing condition" and get discriminated against by insurance companies and subsequently be denied coverage.   I have no statistics to back this up, but I would guess there is a rather large pool of patients out there with Gastroenterology problems who limit (if not completely) their access to a Gastroenterologist in order to reduce their own personal cost. This is bad for the patient, bad for the Gastroenterology community, and also bad for Gastroenterologists in the end.  These are patients which could be brought into greater Gastroenterology care and help support your typical Gastroenterology practice.

So, in short, all Gastroenterology related people should be hoping that the PPACA gets passed. It would be good for the patients and also good for your typical Gastroenterologist.  Feel free to comment on this post with any thoughts or opinions. Here is hoping 9 justices don't think otherwise.