Today's Wall Street Journal posted an op-ed piece explaining one of the ways the government plans to cut the cost of healthcare in its proposed reform. Understandably, Congress is attempting to create a system that is cheaper so that they can provide healthcare for everyone. However, sometimes there is a serious cost in doing something cheaper.
In order to cut costs, Medicare would rank doctors among their peers according to the amount of money they cost the program. Begining in 2015, any doctor who ranks in the top ten percent of costs would have his Medicare reimbursement cut 5 per cent. Medicare currently pays 83 cents on the dollar when compared to private insurance. In practice, this rule will only apply to specialists. It gets worse. According to the article:
"In Medicare, meanwhile, the Administration is using regulation to change how doctors are paid to benefit general practitioners, internists and family physicians. In next year's fee schedule, they'll see higher payments on the order of 6% to 8%. The loose consensus is that the U.S. does have too few primary care doctors--less than 5% of medical students are entering the field--in part because they're underpaid.
"Fair enough. But this boost for GPs comes at the expense of certain specialties. The 2010 rules, which will be finalized next month, visit an 11% overall cut on cardiology and 19% on radiation oncology. They're targets only because of cost: Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease."
Please read the entire article for the details. This is truly the 'kill granny' bill.
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