Wednesday morning's Sentinel carried an article about the upcoming shortage of doctors.  Seventeen percent of doctors nationally are refusing to treat new medicare patients and the trend is worse among primary care doctors.  

The problem is the Medicare bureaucratic payment structure massive amounts of time spent on the billing and the very real threat of prosecution for honest billing differences.

The new National health plan would do well to make sure these things are taken care of, before we are into it.  Otherwise, when you call a doctor, you may find he or she has retired due to government red tape, but we cannot use that for a bandaid.