Medicare is considering throwing more bureaucracy our way.

As MedPage Today reports, because Medicare was “concerned about a rising number of hospice patients who survive longer than six months,” they are now requiring physicians to write a narrative to “describe the clinical evidence supporting a life expectancy of six months or less.”

Even worse, this comes on top of a 1.1 percent cut in reimbursements to hospice care in 2010.

I wonder, as Medicare struggles to save money, whether they’ll ramp up the already burdensome pre-authorizations doctors have to get to obtain, for instance, various imaging scans. The penchant of throwing more hoops for doctors to jump through makes me very wary of how the government is going to run any proposed public plan.