More signs that physicians are again calling his bluff:
“When I moved down here, I thought the only difficulty would be in finding good ones,” she said. “But it turned out that I would call a place and say, ‘I have Med — ‘ and they wouldn’t even let me finish.”Since I started writing this column, I have heard from other readers who have had problems finding doctors who would accept them as new Medicare patients. I ran into the same problem when my mother moved up here from Texas. When I tried to schedule an appointment for her with my longtime general practitioner, his staff was unequivocal: no new Medicare patients . . .
. . . The most recent survey for the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, an independent congressional agency, found that 29 percent of Medicare beneficiaries had problems finding a primary care doctor, compared with 17 percent of younger patients who were privately insured.
Your move, Mr. Stark.
Related posts:
- Pete Stark dares physicians to drop Medicare
- We should send this to Pete Stark
- Pete Stark on specialty hospitals
- Pete Stark regrets his law
- What if Pete Stark lived by his own rules?
- My take: Pete Stark, residents
- Pete Stark versus the free markets
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Just to remind folks what the ferociusly anti-physican US Representative Pete Stark, D-Calif stated: “My colleagues, my staff say, ‘Oh, dear, the doctors would all drop Medicare.’ I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that doctors are willing to give up half their income.”
Well, Pete, now what? Oh, and Pete, you should know that this is only the beginning. Access will drop lie a stone if your 10.4% payment reduction occurs.
Nice move, Pete.
One of the commenters on the Washington Post article made an interesting conclusion:
Simple solution to problem-don’t allow doctors to decide how many Medicare patients they will take on. In other words accept all Medicare patients or you don’t accept any. Many doctors like to use Medicare patients to fill in their billing schedule for the day. From my personal experience Medicare pays a fair price for services rendered.
Here is another comment:
A first step in restoring professional ethics would be to revoke the federal DEA prescribing privileges of physicians who fail to certify annually that they accept patients with publicly supported medical coverages or fail to participate in audits of their patient populations.
I think that this is what Pete Stark is aiming for: force physicians to reject Medicare patients, increase voter resentment towards physicians who refuse Medicare patients while insinuating that greed is the motivation, and eventually legislate indentured servitude onto all physicians in the United States so that it is impossible to practice medicine in the U.S. without accepting whatever the government forces upon physicians.
If it is Medicare-specific, more likely than not doctors would be glad to reject all Medicare patients for the sake of simplicity and the decrease in overhead related to Medicare payments. Unfortunately the public does not yet understand this, and the antagonism which Pete Stark is stirring up against physicians over this is not helping the situation. Neither is the insolvency which Medicare will encounter in 11 years.
Yes, and the proposed Medicare cuts are going to help that process nicely.
Hasn’t this already started in Massachusetts? Don’t they have a law capping the fee you can charge a Medicare eligible patient?
Is that true?
We need to work on our public relations, explain to patients and local businesses why we can’t continue to accept low payment payers and stay in business. If we let the Stark and his allies paint us as simply greedy docs, they can screw us far worse than they are now by mandating Medicare participation.
“I cringe when I hear people say that doctors care more about money than patients. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I’m not a priest. I still have a family to support and I did not take a vow of poverty.” This is a great comment from the article. The others that claim doctors should be forced to accept medicaire just show how ignorant the general public is about the financial challenges that US physicians currently face. I fear that one day doctors will be mandated to accept even more losses to take care of patients causing the crisis to worsen.
I believe the deal in Massachusetts is, you can’t charge a Medicare recipient more than the Medicare limiting fee (as in the nonparticipating docs) as a condition of licensure.
As far as I know, that applies even if you are not in Medicare, as in, opted-out. We had to sign that attestation on our license application and renewal forms.
But it’s been a long time since I practiced in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.
Pete Stark has challenged fellow Members to fights on more than one occasion. Too bad the Members so challenged didn’t take him up on his offer. It would somehow be gratifying if JC Watts had rearranged Stark’s face.
What makes you think Stark is bluffing? Was Truman bluffing when he threatened to draft the Coal Miners?
I don’t think he is bluffing at all and would take advantage of any opportunity to reduce physicians to a state of involuntary servitude as is the case in many nations.
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