The Medicare audits

Where there is a financial interest there will be abuses.

There are abuses by docs now. I see people who code every single visit a level five and never right more than six words. This theft of public funds should be stopped.

But it is clearly predictable that paying bounties will eventually result in severe abuses of providers as well. Unless the bill that set this up also repealed universal laws of human nature.

When that begins occuring on a large scale, docs will begin asking themselves what rational person would work with a bounty hunter on his butt. And for many the answer will be–no rational person is going to accept that if can find any way out of it. You will then see more early retirement, moves to no-medicare practices, even emmigration.

I wonder how many of us will have the adult maturity to recognize that the latter set of grim circumstances when they are upon us could have been avoided had we did more as a profession about the former that brought it about.