Why Obamacare Failed—and Why America’s Doctors Are Quitting Because of It

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This commentary exposes how the ACA reshaped healthcare into a bureaucratic maze of performance metrics, mandatory prescriptions, and pharmaceutical incentives—while pricing middle-class Americans out of coverage and reducing actual access to care. Featuring insight from a major-hospital physician ready to walk away, it uncovers a system where coding matters more than healing and where thoughtful, root-cause medicine has been replaced by checkboxes and drug quotas.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Now we're never, folks, time to repeal Obamacare. I'm going
to go through the list of failures here. Obamacare dramatically
increased health insurance premiums and cost sharing in the individual market.
Obamacare collapsed insure competition in the nation's individual markets. Obamacare
failed to meet official enrollment targets in the individual markets.

(00:40):
Obamacare is pricing middle class Americans out of individual market coverage.
Obamacare expanded government coverage while wrecking the private individual health
insurance market. Obamacare compromise access to care for persons, including
those pre existing medical conditions, enroll in the nation's individual markets.

(01:03):
Obamacare failed and failed miserably to attract young people into
the exchange insurance pools. Obamacare Medicaid expansion prioritizes able bodied adults,
many of whom are working or the elderly, the disabled
and poor, and children, Okay, over all of them. Obamacare

(01:24):
did not as predicted ben the curve of America's healthcare spending.
Obamacare's vaunted delivery reforms did not yield the anticipated savings.
Why we still have it, I don't know. I don't know,
because it's got Obama in the name, even though it's
called the Affordable Care Act. Maybe people didn't call it Obamacare.

(01:47):
Maybe we've been able to get rid of it already.
Who knows? And I had to sent over to me.
This is a that's from an MD at a major
hospital and considering leaving medicine. Do you know it's sixty
percent of doctors right now in practice are considering leaving medicine.

(02:09):
And again, this doctor is not looking to leave because
of the patients, caring about the patients, the long hours,
and everything goes along with that. It is well, it's
the job now, it's how the job is done. The
system at our hospital, every diagnosis comes with the expectation

(02:32):
of prescribing the drug that matches the code. If this doctor,
if she doesn't do this, why why are you not
doing this? She's evaluated sometimes even financially penalized through performance
metrics tied to quality measures HM. Basically, this is did

(02:54):
you give the patient the medicine that the system expects.
And this has been happening for some times, but she
says it's getting worse every year. So she didn't go
into medicine to be a cog in the pharmaceutical machine.
She went out to actually help people. Hospital incentives don't reward.

(03:22):
They don't reward actual encouragement, lifestyle coaching, conversations about exercise, nutrition, movement, prescriptions,
or actually finding out why why you're sick? How did
this happen? How do we get to this point in time?
There's no bonus for helping a patient reverse insulin resistance.

(03:49):
Plenty tiede to metrics on prescribing statins, glp ones, anti hypertensives,
SSRIs and anything else that fits neatly into a billing code.
And this pay for performance system pharma influence the revenue
structures for hospitals that are tried to drug utilization. Again,

(04:13):
it's telling doctors what to do. I mean, maybe we'd
be able to you know, maybe they're looking for some
day where they can just have the optimist robots do
the job and sign off on people's prescriptions. Again, to
the many doctors feel trapped. They want to practice slow,

(04:35):
thoughtful medicine. There's no time or if they want to
focus on root causes, there's no billing code. This is
where we're at today. Again, sixty percent of doctors that
are out there want to leave. They're being told in

(04:55):
many of these hospital systems, in various different groups, Okay,
this is what the person has, this is what you're
going to get some drug. Oh that, I'm sure the
patient will be comfortable with it because they saw the
dancing people on TV pushing the drug watchdog on Wall

(05:18):
Street dot Com