How To Save Money On Healthcare By Denying Care To Granny

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Yesterday's Washington Times had an editorial explaining how care would be denied to the elderly under the current healthcare proposal (without calling it "death panels").  The idea that there would be death panels has been mocked by the proponents of this bill, and yet there is a mechanism that would definitely deny quality care to the elderly. 

According to the article:

"The offending provision is on Pages 80-81 of the unamended Baucus bill, hidden amid a lot of similar legislative mumbo-jumbo about Medicare payments to doctors. The key sentence: "Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Translated into plain English, it means that in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."

There is no provisions here for results, quality of care, or efficiency--just cost.  The irony of this provision is that it would only save $1 billion over six years (that is without adding in the expense of monitoring all doctors' spending on the elderly and administering the program).  No doctor would be aware of what the spending limits were until the end of the year, forcing doctors to be overly cautious in the care given to the elderly.

I have said it before--let's totally scrap this bill and make an honest attempt to draft a bi-partisan bill from scratch. 

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This page contains a single entry by Granny G published on September 26, 2009 7:41 AM.

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