Cutting physician payments will escalate health care costs: “If you cut payment for services as a cost control (the 10% cut), you will get more volume by the survivors doing the expensive highly profitable procedures, AND you will get declining access from the already high volume, low profit centers (primary care). In other words, you will get less primary care (the cheap stuff) and you will get more expensive proceduralization by specialists.”
Grab your popcorn, because next week will be “extraordinary political theater.“
And yes, this will be routine if single-payer/Medicare for all were to be enacted: “Under a ‘universal health insurance system,’ which is advocated by the Democrats, political fights like this would happen every year. Doctors and insurers, if they were still in business, would face payment cuts. Patients would face uncertainty about who their doctors and insurers would be. And relationships between doctors, insurers and patients would become more strained than some of them already are.”
Related posts:
- Medicare cuts update
- Medicare cuts: This politician gets it
- The Medicare cuts are coming
- My take: Medicare payment cuts averted
- Op-ed: Doctors’ pay cuts save little in health costs
- Gawande on health reform: "It is not single-payer"
- Medicare cuts, D-day is upon us
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The good news here this Monday is that George Bush has frozen the medicare cutbacks, so that Congress will have another wack at Grassley-Baucus bill. We need to keep up the pressure. AARP played a huge roll in this matter…
I think that it is a big mistake to make primary care physicians take the cuts in pay when the specialists are still raking it in. Hopefully Congress will wise up!
Changes have to be made somewhere – it seems that everyone says, “It’s not me!” The system needs to thorough examination/review but I don’t think the vested interests will allow that to happen.
(Thank you, Kevin for not using the “r” word in this post. That wasn’t so hard was it? Bravo!)
So in essence again it’s “pay us more”. OK, where’s the money come from?
And why do you keep signing contracts with the government?
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