Some practices won’t have any viable option and will close. Not every practice can stay open with a cut that halves or worse the income of the doctors. When you stop paying a living wage, or even a competitive wage, people quit. Even owners quit. Contrary to what some people think, doctors will not continue to serve Medicare beneficiaries regardless of the payment the program provides.

The Tricare military beneficiary and retiree program will also go to the weeds, and fast.

If you end up losing money either way, seeing patients or not, you can’t count on “professionalism” or other notion of duty to expect doctors to continue working. Practices are like other businesses and when they don’t run in the black, they’re done. If they can’t make their practice run without Medicare, on whatever terms of payment they can devise, they fold.

And to Solo Family Doctor MD: suicide or murder, at the end of the day, what is the difference? Not viable, as in a business that can’t pay its key employee, the doctor, is just another failed business. We aren’t special, at least not special enough to be able to avoid the general rules of any private business, and most of us aren’t living on trust funds that we can afford to work without earning an income.

Will never happen.

What I believe is hapening is the slow death of Medicare by a million pinpricks. By this I mean, slowly reduced access as physicians limit their Medicare practices to fewer and fewerf easy cases.

If you are really, really sick in the near future, good luck trying to find anyone decent to follow you as a patient. Obama’s $500 billion cut in Medicare will devastate acute care.

As an extra unintended negative consequence, the top specialists are already shutting their doors to new Medicare cases. You soon will no longer see any of the best doctors.

In any case the Baby Boomers are in for a colossal shock as they are forced against their wills into Medicare.

The only way patients will care is if you cut them off

Drop out of Medicare en mass.

That is the only effective means to this political end

But all the revenue and savings went to support the massive health care overhaul, and the fix had to be shuffled aside.

Also, as was recently reported, the AMA makes most of its money from their copyright of the CPT coding system. According the National Review blog, AMA reports revenue of $268M, $210M from publishing…mainly the CPT code. That they want to sustain a CPT-based cost-plus system is not surprising.

BUT Dr. Shah hit the nail on the head. American doctors will loose ALL control when they tie our licensing power (like Mass is trying) or our prescribing power (see obamacare that only allows Medicare accepting physicians to write for wheelchairs). Rohack needs
to stop acting after the fact. No other lobbying group would have given up so much.

Sorry to sound so cynical. Usually I try to keep my optimistic self in check. I think that the solution to all of this would have been a health care reform package that somehow did not cater to the insurance companies and that included liability reform.

When we have real improvements in the form of insurance portability, which may create competitive premium pricing, then perhaps we will see a change in the way insurance companies do business.

Barring that, ALL physicians would need to magically come together and voice their objection to the government’s meddling in the pricing of health care.

I would like to see some sort of fix before I reach Medicare age, myself!