Was anyone really fooled into believing that Obamacare would provide more of the nation with better health at lower cost?

Now that the Health Care legislation has been passed and we can at last see what’s in it, as Nancy Pelosi promised we would, a great many bad things are being found in there. And a great many undesirable consequences are emerging.

Just one example of a nasty restriction buried deep: You may not be allowed to pay for treatment out of your own pocket. Section 2713 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act bans you from getting certain treatments at your own expense. You cannot buy immunizations and certain gynecological screenings, for instance, unless you first get government permission. (For more on this, see The Daily Caller here.)

And one highly undesirable consequence will be a severe shortage of doctors, as Investor’s Business Daily points out:

One of the marks of national health care is the waiting-list problem that plagues Britain and Canada. Delays in treatment have caused suffering and, in some cases, death. Soon, we’ll be waiting for doctors too.

Last week, the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that the looming doctor shortage will be worse than previous reports claim because of ObamaCare.

Rather than “a baseline shortage of 39,600 doctors in 2015, current estimates bring that number closer to 63,000, with a worsening of shortages through 2025,” says the medical college group’s Center for Workforce Studies.

Unless the country acts now, says the Center for Workforce Studies, we will be more than 91,000 doctors short in just 10 years. The number includes a shortage of 45,000 primary care physicians and 46,000 surgeons and medical specialists. …

Two years ago, the physician search firm of Merritt, Hawkins & Associates estimated that by 2020 the U.S. will need 90,000 to 200,000 more doctors than we will have. At that point, the wait to see a doctor for a routine visit would be three to four months. [Optimistically – JB.]

A year after the Merritt Hawkins report, Joseph Stubbs, president of the American College of Physicians, the country’s second-largest doctor group, talked about the arrival of “a catastrophic crisis” even before ObamaCare had been passed and signed. …

As alarming as those numbers are, the reality might be worse. The ranks will be thinned as physicians simply refuse to work under ObamaCare. In August 2009, 45% of doctors told our IBD/TIPP Poll that they would consider leaving their practices or taking early retirement if the Democrats’ version of reform were to become law. And it did.

The doctors cited various reasons behind their decisions to leave. But the most common explanations centered around the increased costs under the Democrats’ plan, the bureaucratic controls it would bring [mountains of paperwork, as in Britain – JB] and its lack of protection from runaway malpractice lawsuits. …

There’s an English proverb: “Every man at thirty is a fool or a physician.”

One might say that under Obamacare, only a fool would become a physician.