Free Republic

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...

First paragraph at end..... While the market hub known as Mid-C or Mid-Columbia is only seconds away from Southern California on the DC Intertie, Platt's reports that traders require a 31% risk margin for transactions in California's administered markets versus transactions in the Pacific Northwest's open markets. The language in the Office of Management and Budget proposal is not clear whether the intention is to raise BPA's wholesale rates to market rates on the West Coast or to bring rates to national levels. The proposal to bring rates to national levels would make little sense as a market solution, because...