President is Math-Challenged on Fiscal Crisis, Doctors Say

TUCSON, Ariz., Sept. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The President says "it's the math"—not class warfare—when calling for significant "shared sacrifice" to be borne by the "super rich."

One problem is that there aren't enough millionaires and billionaires, and they don't have enough money, according to the October issue of AAPS News, the newsletter of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. http://www.aapsonline.org/index.php/site/article/aaps_news_october_2011_-_we_cant_fix_the_titanic/

Even if we could collect an extra $200,000 from every one of the 4 million people earning that much or more in a year we'd have only $800 billion, not enough to cover a single year's deficit.

Already, the super rich are going missing. The number of returns reporting an adjusted gross income greater than $200,000 decreased by 13% between 2007 and 2009.

Other targets for the sacrifice are doctors. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, which ObamaCare creates to cut Medicare spending, has only one real tool—cutting payments to providers.

It is often said that doctors in nations with socialized medicine make only about half as much as American doctors, and their populations are just as healthy. Why not cut doctors' Medicare revenue in half, cuts even more sacrificial than those scheduled to occur through the Clinton/Gingrich sustained growth rate (SGR) formula that Congress keeps overriding?

This would actually mean cutting doctors' take-home pay from Medicare patients to zero, since the overhead for most doctors' offices is at least 50%.

How would this affect the federal budget? Payments to doctors constitute about 19% of medical spending. So if we cut half of 19% of $500 billion in Medicare spending, we would save only $47.5 billion, which is less than 5% of $1 trillion.

Doctors don't have enough money to make a dent in the deficit either. And if they can't make a living, doctors will go missing also.

"Politicians need to do the math, not just say the word," said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of AAPS. "We need to see their actual numbers. Then we need to calculate the effects on the economy and on the availability of medical care."

AAPS, a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, (www.aapsonline.org) was founded in 1943 to defend the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship.

SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)