Doctors' Medicare pay cuts killed; fund likely to shrink

[OhioChick]

Sunday, December 17, 2006

For the fifth time in four years, Congress has erased a pay cut for physicians, without providing money to cover the $1.8 billion cost.

The move will force Medicare to raid a dwindling reserve fund that the government tapped after each of the four previous pay-cut reversals.

And that's not all.

The legislation approved about 1:30 a.m. Dec. 9 also included a bonus for doctors who report whether they follow suggested treatment procedures. The bonus will equal 1.5 percent of what a doctor earns to treat a Medicare patient. A doctor doesn't have to do the procedures to receive the bonus, just submit the report.

"If he knows he's going to report it, that will encourage him to do it," said Ellen Griffith Cohen, a Medicare spokeswoman.

http://www.cleveland.com/ohio/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1166348563101340.xml&coll=2

<snip> U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who chaired the Senate Finance Committee, and other supporters say the bonus is an incentive to provide good care and assures that physicians can continue to practice medicine.

Critics like California Democrat Pete Stark, who will head a House health subcommittee next year, argue that doctors don't deserve a bonus for what they were already paid once to do.

[bluerum]

1. I don't see anything wrong with providing for raises and bonus's

for doctors. They deserve to have their income keep pace with inflation as well.

I DO have a MAJOR problem with insurance companies rewarding doctors for following treatment plans designed by actuaries to maximize insurance company profits.

IMO, medicine is better practiced by an agile design methodology than by a prescribed procedural method. Doctors must have the flexibility to decide when, where and how to treat based on circumstances specific to individual patients.