Thankfully, the GOP did not pass Paul Ryan’s repeal and replace bill for Obamacare. Immediately after, I saw a headline hopefully concluding, “Medicare for all may be next.” In Medicare’s current form, this would be devastating for the health of America. I am a young geriatrician; I know a heck of a lot about Medicare. Most people don’t. They just see it as a great perk of turning 65 in America and the social health care we offer to elderly and disabled. I did too, until I became a physician who only sees Medicare patients.
Medicare originated in 1966 in recognition that we needed to do a better job as a nation at caring for our aging and disabled who could not get employer-provided insurance. In 1989 the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act established a fee schedule for Medicare payments. This assigns “relative value units” or RVUs to everything we do for our patients in medicine. The formula that determines RVUs disproportionately favors procedural care to time-based care. Essentially, Medicare pays and incentivizes medical providers to do things to patients and actually disincentivizes physicians from taking their time with patients.
If you wonder why the doctor-patient relationship is not doing well right now, wonder no more. Trust takes time. Even family doctors who take Medicare have to turn their practice into a patient or low-risk procedure mill to make ends meat. Medicare will pay a physician between $70 to $80 to freeze off a wart, a procedure that takes about 2 minutes to do, and 1 minute to document in an EMR.
In contrast, I can spend an hour with an elderly patient with multiple complicated issues, addressing their concerns, reviewing and adjusting their many medications, and coming up with a plan and then having to take 30 minutes later to document what happened and get paid essentially the same amount (about $80) had I just spent 3 minutes removing a wart and sending them out the door. Is it any wonder that geriatrics is a dying field?
There was a time, however, when despite the RVU working against physicians who primarily use their time and knowledge to diagnose and care for patients, physicians still did it because they could make a decent living while being fulfilled in the solace they were helping. But times have changed. My father is a geriatrician. He went to the equivalent of his state medical school from 1978 to 1982 for $5,000 a year in tuition. No loans needed. Had I gone to my state school (same as his) from 2006 to 2010, in-state tuition would have been $25,000 per year. I came out of medical school with roughly $200,000 in debt at anywhere from 7 to 15 percent interest that accrues quarterly, and I’m lucky.
The physicians today in their fifties to seventies truly cannot comprehend the financial sacrifice new physicians make when committing to primary care today. But, it’s not all about the money. There is far more paperwork, tracking of useless data, non-patient care related work that we are forced to do that merely detracts from the already limited time we have to see patients and develop a relationship. And we have to deal with this burden from day 1 of our practicing lives. Many of the older docs have moved into administrative roles yet still remember clinical practice how they experienced it. In turn, they create detrimental policies and regulations to feed metrics in the name of “quality” all while being clueless as to what it is like to actually treat patients in the modern era.
Some might argue that by expanding Medicare for all, it would cover less complicated patients so the current model shouldn’t be a problem. I’d also beg to differ on that one. Doing things to people, even prescribing medications, is dangerous and should not be taken for granted. Medicare still incentivizes doing more invasive things for the least complicated patients. Say we expand it to everyone, and a 22-year-old comes in with the cough she’s had for five days. It’s viral. Viruses are the worst. There is no treatment other than time and support. But convincing patients of this when they know I have the power to prescribe a Z-pak and they always get better on the Z-pak (20 percent of the effect of any treatment is placebo) takes a long empathetic conversation.
You know what is quick and easier? You got it, just writing the darn script and moving on to the next person so I can get paid more. And then we have massive bacterial resistance to azithromycin (the Z-pak) and C. diff is on the rise.
The numbers on all accounts point to the reality that Medicare’s RVU system of paying providers is causing worse outcomes, is unsustainable in cost, and is not attracting young talented physicians to the most needed primary care fields. I wonder how many of the new family docs will inevitably succumb to 10-minute visits with high procedures and more referrals to costly specialists or ultimately opt-out of Medicare and insurance for direct primary care? Medicare spent 650 billion dollars in 2015. An underestimate suggests 200 billion dollars (or 30 percent) was spent on beneficiaries in their final year of life. That means we as a medical community, despite probably knowing the patients were dying, kept doing procedures and tests and more treatments to people because that is what we are paid to do.
American culture indoctrinates us that death is optional. It’s really not. But why would a physician take the time explain to a patient and family the reality of their situation, a conversation that is exhausting and challenging for everyone involved, when they are paid about 5x more to just offer another procedure or test and move on? And then we spend billions of dollars doing things while ignoring the essentials that require time, and we get the worst outcomes. The current Medicare, if expanded to all, will only exacerbate the costly failures of our current system.
A single-payer universal coverage system? Yes, please! But not Medicare as we know it. Heed the geriatricians now while you still can. We’re the most needed physician endangered species.
Shannon Tapia is a geriatrician who blogs at Medicine on Tap.
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
