:shock: This from today's I-Own-the-World... Obama's Health Nazi's were going to send spies into doctor's offices across the country to spy on the doctors to make sure that they were "behaving correctly." What a great use of our tax money! I would have volunteered for one of those job! I can picture meself...undercover as it were...interrogating Stu's or Terry's staff: "Do you know where he keeps his football picks?" "Has he ever assigned you to stall patients while he talks to his football buddies online?" Yes. Another great idea from the Big Thinkers who want to solve the world's problems with our money... How Can We Oppress Today? Home - by BigFurHat - June 30, 2011 - 12:42 America/New_York - 7 Comments American Spectator - On Tuesday evening, after being outed by the New York Times, the Obama Administration abandoned plans to have “mystery shoppers” call primary care physicians to determine how easy or difficult it is to get a doctor’s appointment and whether being part of a government health insurance program impacted that ease or difficulty. The original proposal from the Department of Health and Human Services, dated April 28, 2011, specified that a division of HHS would contact 465 Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) in each of nine states: “Each PCP’s office will be contacted twice; once using a privately insured patient scenario, and once using a publicly insured patient scenario. HHS also planned to call 465 more PCPs (in total, not per state) who would “be informed about the study and asked directly if they are accepting new patients and how long it would take to obtain an appointment. The purpose of this additional data collection component is to evaluate the validity of the mystery shopper approach in generating accurate estimates of physician availability and timeliness of services.” Does anyone believe that a doctor really wants to tell a government questioner that he’s avoiding taking new government-funded patients? One defense of the plan that has been made by liberal talking heads is that the use of “mystery shoppers” is a common practice by private businesses who want to make sure their products are being sold as much and as well as possible. But of course, government is not a business; government is power. A business is trying to maximize the chances that a consumer makes a decision to buy that business’s product rather than someone else’s. The government, especially this Administration, has the opposite aim: to take as much decision-making ability as possible away from both consumers and providers of health care. The voluntary aspects of consumer choice and doctors’ rights to run their own businesses versus the compulsion of government power makes the comparison ridiculous, though maybe not in the minds of liberals who believe that most people are too stupid to make their own decisions. The most likely outcome of the “mystery shopper” program would have been heavy-handed federal regulations on how doctors must behave… The Obama Administration is all about blaming anyone but itself: blame the victim, blame an observer, blame anyone but The One! • The top 1% of earners who pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes (more than the bottom 90% of taxpayers combined, and despite earning only about 20% of total national income), nevertheless are the targets of Obama’s class warfare rhetoric and policy. • Obama blamed “the 24-hour news cycle and cable television and blogs” for citizens’ anger against Obamacare as displayed at town hall meetings in 2009 when Americans suspected — as they now know – that we are victims of the most damaging piece of legislation in modern American history. • Obama blamed ATMs for unemployment (shorthand for blaming technological progress generally) when the unemployed are victims of this government’s failed economic plans. (To be sure, the Bush Administration has plenty to answer for as well. But Obama’s economic team — what’s left of it anyway — is incapable of realizing that they’re in a deep hole and it’s time to stop digging.) The doctors are the next victims to be blamed, and they know it. The Obama Administration now says, though it was not in what it submitted to the Federal Register, that data about the doctors’ responses would have been kept anonymous and aggregated, and that it would not have been used against any individual or group of doctors. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.