Michael Hebert on the annual dance we do with Congress on the Medicare fee cuts:
There are ways to encourage doctors to be more cost efficient. Giving them a salary cut every time medical costs rise faster than the price of rice is not one of them.And anyway, it hasn’t worked. Medical costs continue to outstrip GDP growth regardless of the threat of cuts. This is not a surprise. What doctor is going to choose to use a cheaper antibiotic to treat a patient with pneumonia because it will affect the Medicare reimbursement formula? There are too many billions being thrown around in Washington for any one doctor to think saving a few hundred here or there will change the big numbers. As the Chinese say, in an avalanche, no snowflake feels responsible. Or as I say, you can’t convince somebody to eat fewer beans by arguing that flatus contributes to global warming.
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- The Medicare cuts
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What sense does it make for Medicare to decrease reimbursements?
Every professional job gets paid more each year to keep up with inflation. It’s not like Doctors are getting faster and faster at seeing patients or reading xrays. Health care is not a product that gets cheaper as production increases, it gets more expensive because the people providing this service need more money to keep up with the rising costs of everything in life(food, homes, health care!).
Medicare should be increasing reimbursements unless the cost of providing a specific service has decreased (eg speculum for pap smear now costs less).
Or at least you should be free to balance bill in the “land of the free”.
The fact is that a growing and aging population coupled with a growing demand for health services will raise costs. This requires additional revenue. Provider costs, especially employee labor costs, rise every year. Don’t believe the absence of a Medicare update is neutral. You lose by the amount of price inflation of the goods and services you personally purchase PLUS the increased overhead costs you bear in your practice.
The fact that Medicare reimbursments overall remained the same this year means you probably suffered a 7% net decrease in buying power when everything is accounted for.
That’s exactly what I was getting at. Medicare reimbursements should be increasing, not decreasing. All this talk over stopping the decreases seems to blind people to this.
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