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.”