The CMS wants to cut Medicaid payments to graduate medical education funding. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot:
How does the government expect us to supply our nation with good physicians by cutting back on the funding to train those physicians? The National Center for Policy Analysis stated that as of 2004, the federal government spends $176 billion each year just for care of Medicaid patients. States throw in an extra $112 billion per year. That’s almost half a trillion dollars we spend in this country each year just to care for Medicaid patients! Expenses need to be cut, but where is all the money going?
Related posts:
- CBO cost analysis of the Baucus health reform plan
- How to make industry influence transparent in continuing medical education
- A Medicaid-majority patient panel
- Cutting Medicaid payments
- The government has already proven itself
- Treating the uninsured in New Orleans
- The cost of medical education
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 4 comments }
For all the talk about MD’s, DO’s, IMG’s and all that, most of the time that’s like talking about where you went to high school. The residency is what counts. Where you went to med school is ancient history.
Graduate medical education is the choke point. Talk about being dependent on government money, it’s postgraduate training that’s most vulnerable.
Interesting. It was because Medicare provided support to residency training programs that the case was made to restrict payments to those same institutions for care rendered by resident physicians but billed through their supervising, and legally responsible, attendings. The argument was based on not having to pay twice, since the resident was already being paid by Medicare. What followed were big audits, large fines and compulsory repayments and much stricter guidelines on what services could be billed against Medicare from academic teaching programs.
Now it seems Medicare wants both ways at once. Somehow that is not likely to work.
Medicare has been around since 1965. The medical profession since 500 BC. How was training paid for before?
Tuition and the hospital’s own private funding. I knew doctors, pre-Medicaid, who worked primary care for a few years to save enough to pay their own way through specialty training.
Relatively speaking, an advantage was a motivation to keep the training time short and learning effective.
Disadvantage, fewer specialists.
The 500 B.C. part, read the Hippocratic Oath:
“….To consider dear to me, as my parents, him who taught me this art; to live in common with him and, if necessary, to share my goods with him; To look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this art….”
I think I see how Hippocrates planned his retirement account and children’s educational expenses.
Comments on this entry are closed.