Senate Democrats hit snag with doctor payment bill

In the face of solid Republican opposition, Senate Democrats on Tuesday backed down from their effort to increase Medicare payments to doctors without offsetting any of the cost over the next 10 years. It was the first skirmish in a larger partisan battle over President Obama’s effort to remake the health care system in a fiscally responsible way.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, had hoped to whisk the Medicare bill through the Senate this week, before taking up a much larger bill to provide health insurance to nearly 30 million Americans.

But Republicans had other ideas, and so did some moderate and conservative Democrats. They said they could not swallow the Medicare bill because it would cost $247 billion over 10 years and none of the cost would be offset or paid for.

Mr. Reid said the bill would “fix” a flawed formula that threatens to cut Medicare payments to doctors by 21 percent in 2010 and by about 5 percent in each of the next few years. If such cuts occurred, he said, fewer doctors would accept Medicare patients.

Here is the whole dang problem from a physician point of view. The whole problem started with Medicare. After that along with Medicaid we have been put in the position of begging the .gov. I personally laugh when other physicians bring it up. I want to say and sometimes do say “Well what in Heck did you expect”. We are terribly under paid by both the programs. We had done O:K some better than others ONLY because of private insurance. I just laugh and laugh cause physicians are fixing to see their doom. We will be replaced with lesser trained nurse practioners and LORD help YOU physician assistants cause it is CHEAPER and these professionals have been trained to follow .gov protocols. They get paid to do so. They are on salary. Which is what is going to happen to physicians. Physicians are a dead duck. We are going to beomce .gov employees and YOU are going to LOVE the care you GET or ELSE!!!!!! I am still laughing cause otherwise I would cry. But, WE have brought this on ourselves.

We were traveling in England last spring after my husband attended a medical conference there. Our cab driver was telling us about his wife’s work as head ER nurse in the local hospital. We got the impression that she was IT as far as being the top health provider there. While at the conference, my husband said about 90% of the papers presented, rather than being about scientific advancement, were about cost containment, including how well the x-ray techs read the studies. Very depressing.

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