Washington won't let me help my patients: Column

In the coming weeks, Americans will start to learn how much our health insurance premiums are going to increase for 2015. It won't be pretty. Early evidence suggests the percentage increases could be in the double digits, adding to the average 41% spike we saw last year when the Affordable Care Act went into effect.

It's easy to point the finger at doctors and health insurance companies, but we're not the ones driving up health care costs. The real fault lies with bureaucrats in Washington.

Every year, lawmakers wrap health care providers like me in ever-tighter reams of red tape. Their ceaseless pen-pushing raises prices, limits availability and reduces face-to-face time between doctors and patients.

This problem preceded the Affordable Care Act by decades. Whether it's Medicare, Medicaid or something else, every federal health care reforms only empower bureaucracies to write the tune to which health care providers must dance.

Yet Obamacare worsened the bureaucratic burden like nothing I've ever seen. By October, the law had already created 11,000 pages of regulation. It has added thousands more since.

Doctors, hospitals and insurers must hire armies of lawyers and administrators to make sense of this system. This leads to mountains of paperwork. I've had to hire extra staff to fill out forms, file them and fax them. Even for a private practice doctor like me, this dramatically increases costs while worsening the patient's experience. This also explains why doctors rarely spend enough time with patients. We're forced to do paperwork, too.

It's rarely obvious that the regulations are the root of patient problems. But we got a taste last fall when 6 million to 9 million Americans lost their health insurance plans because they didn't comply with Obamacare. In place of their canceled plans, they were instructed to purchase insurance from the federal exchange.

They discovered a rude shock. According to Forbes, the average premiums for health insurance plans in my state of Arkansas increased by 138% last year. Other states saw average spikes of 41%. For many, these more expensive plans came with higher deductibles, higher co-pays and often smaller provider networks.

But these higher premiums provide a more restrictive scope of care.

In order to comply with Obamacare's price and coverage mandates, insurers must make severe trade-offs and sacrifice many medications and procedures. They do this in order to keep premiums down. If they didn't, health care would be even more expensive.

Such is the awkward position forced on us by Washington. No doctor wants less time with her patients. We value the doctor-patient relationship above all else. But now our hands are tied by Washington's never-ending need to regulate our every move.

Kathryn Chenault is a neurologist practicing in North Little Rock.

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