Newsmax reports, “The Obama administration will make historic changes to how the U.S. pays its annual… health-care bill, aiming to curtail a costly habit of paying doctors and hospitals without regard to quality or effectiveness. Starting next year Medicare, which covers about 50 million elderly and disabled Americans, will base 30 percent of payments on how well health providers care for patients, some of which will put them at financial risk based on the quality they deliver. By 2018, the goal is to put half of payments under the new system. For doctors and health facilities, the system will tie tens, and then hundreds, of billions of dollars in payments to how their patients fare, rather than how much work a doctor or hospital does, lowering the curtain on Medicare’s system of paying line-by-line for each scan, test and surgery.” [70794] The premise of the scheme is that doctors should be rewarded for results, rather than simply be reimbursed, item by item, for tests and procedures. That may sound appealing to people with limited intellectual facilities, but the unintended consequence of such a policy will be that physicians will be unwilling to take on patients who are unhealthy! Why, for example, would a doctor accept as a new patient a morbidly obese man or woman with diabetes who just turned 65 and went on Medicare? Regardless of that doctor’s skills and talents, he cannot control the eating and exercise habits of his patient. If a different patient dies from lung cancer, does that justify cutting the physician’s Medicare payments simply because the patient did not get cured? How will federal bureaucrats decide whether a doctor or a hospital “deserves” a higher or a lower Medicare payment? Why, for that matter, should a federal bureaucrat be making such decisions? When “healthy patients” means “higher Medicare reimbursements,” who would doubt that some chronically unhealthy senior citizens will have difficulty finding a physician willing to treat them when it means a financial loss?
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 02:02:32 +0000
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