Posted on 11/24/2010 1:52:38 AM PST by Scanian
My Medicare patients -- and those who'll soon qualify -- are worried. Will the doctors they're used to seeing still be able to take care of them when big cuts in Medicare payments are constantly hanging overhead?
Even if I keep seeing a particular patient, I don't know that I'll still be able to find specialists to examine his skin, perform his stress test, operate on his hip or remove his cataract.
Medicare reimbursement to me for an average primary-care visit has remained around $50 for the past decade, even as my office expenses have skyrocketed. Cataract and hip-replacement operations both now pay around $900, colonoscopy less than $400, well below market rate
And that's before the current 23 percent Medicare cuts are applied.
I reassure my Medicare patients that I'll take care of them no matter what, that I'm not practicing medicine for the money. But as my expenses rise and my patients age and have more medical problems (more than half my patients are on Medicare now), how long can I keep my office open?
That Congress is passing a one-month postponement of the 23 percent cuts does little to reassure me. The cuts themselves are the result of an arbitrary formula Congress and President Bill Clinton adopted in 1997 -- a formula that penalizes doctors for rising medical costs.
The leaders of the American Medical Association (that pathetic organization of bureaucrats and lobbyists) sold its support for President Obama's health-care "reforms" for a promise to permantently repeal these cuts -- and was promptly disappointed. The so-called "doctor fix" didn't make it into the reform law because it cost too much by Washington's eccentric accounting standards
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Any’s been a lying lib for over 50 years.
Only a real Rube would pay attention to him.
I thought the answer was supposed to be nurse practitioners with one fourth the training, all of it less rigorous; but Berwick wants to eliminate 80% of those visits, anyway, so there’s the road map.
Do you think he indoctrinated Ronnie Howard, or did he develop the leftist mentality naturally?
Kinda hard to avoid picking up that bug in Hollywood, ffrom what I can see.
After I posted, I was just thinking of adolescence with “da Fonz,” Henry Winkler; what a mentor there.
Liberals are the only people on earth who believe doctors should work for free.
This is why we must not allow any product or service that requires human labor to produce or provide to be classified as a "right", which the left is trying to do with health care.
Once something is defined as a right, the provider of that "right" becomes a slave.
“Liberals are the only people on earth who believe doctors should work for free” ... because it will be free when government pays for everything. /s
I’ll be 65 in a few months and just received my packet from Uncle Sam: Happy Birthday. You will no longer be eligible for healthcare through Tricare Prime and must switch to Medicare.
It is not something I’m looking forward to.
In many situations, NPs and PAs CAN provide services without requiring an MD, and they make perfectly viable alternatives as PCPs for many people. Of course NPs don't get the same amount of training as MDs - they fill a different niche. Not everything in health care requires an MD. Providers at the Masters degree level are nothing to sneer at, and they are a reasonable cost-saving alternative in many situations.
One thing I think is really stupid is the AACN's push to require a Doctorate level degree (DNP - Doctor of Nursing Practice) as the new entry level for advanced practice nursing (currently a Master Degree NP). Talk about stupid BS out of academia! Of course they say this degree won't conflict with regular MD programs or impact Master degree programs, but it will do both while simultaneously raising health care costs for everyone by effectively killing the NP level of provider.
IMHO...the investment banks basically looted Medicare and stole the American health care system to pay for their bad bets. And Congress aided and abetted them-in every way.
There is not a single good reason We the People face the present economic circumstances. It can be summed up as the consequence of professional malpractice, by bankers and brokers, complicated by political and legislative professional malpractice in Congress. This whole situation clearly disabuses the need for a “professional” political class.
No. It means that he knows as much about medicine as he does about string theory and quantum physics. Like all liberals, lack of knowledge didn't stop him from commenting as though he had all the facts.
That $50 figure in the article is correct, and includes filling out whatever paperwork the patient might have, and follow-up phone calls etc.
“Once something is defined as a right, the provider of that “right” becomes a slave.”
So true. As long as politicians, lawyers, and entertainers are thought of as ‘special’ and above the rest of us, and their incomes remain untouched, it doesn’t matter what happens to the efforts, dreams, and ambitions of the rest of us.
I am being treated by a neurologist who takes all patients. He is a compassionate, older gentle man who is genuinely on a mission to help his patients feel less pain regardless of their disease/condition. He treats the whole person; physical, emotional, spiritual. And he is very knowledgeable and experienced with many procedures and combinations of treatments to gain the desired results. He treats you as an individual not a means to gain for himself.
And for all of this, on my part at least the US Dept of Labor pays him about 33 cents on the dollar for his charges. I honestly do not know how he does it.
Well, I do. He’s a Godly man.
Bump
If Medicare fails, and it will under this butthole plan, then so will the retired Military’s over 65 Tricare for Life health ins..they are tied together.
Yep.
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