Medicare Worthless

Thanks to Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate and the US House of Representatives we again learn the danger of taking money from the government whether you’re talking welfare, tax breaks, or Medicare or Medicaid or Tricare. As you have likely heard, effective June 1 of this year Medicare cut their physician fee schedule by 21.3%. Given that many doctors are small businesses with overhead sometimes exceeding 50% this cut in income (note Medicare these days makes up 50% or more of physician income) will result in a cut in physician pay of 50%-100%. This is what we get for agreeing to file claims to the government in the first place - they can give it and they can later take it after the entire industry restructures such that it can’t live without this source of payment. Seniors and disabled people don’t really have access in most cases to private insurance and few can afford to pay cash for their healthcare thanks in part to the oppressive taxation of any money they might have otherwise saved for this purpose. As a result the government froze payments for the first 2 weeks of June resulting in Medicare payments stoppping 100% for up to 2 weeks - how many businesses can afford that? When payments start coming in in the next week or two they’ll be paid at a rate 21.3% lower. Given that much of the care provided for this 78.7% of normal reimbursement was paid for by the doctor (employee salaries, supplies, rent, utilities, insurance) this puts quite a squeeze on many practices and if not reversed quickly (and I’m talking weeks here) many practices will have to lay off from 50-100% of their staff - that’s right - many practices will have to close and patients will be left to find their doctors and without access to their records as who will be able to pay anyone to provide them those records once the money runs out? And where will they go for care? In this town very few doctors are taking new patients at all, much less new Medicare patients.

I urge everyone to contact their representatives in the house and senate and get them to reverse this cut immediately and to fix the physician reimbursement system quickly before the whole system melts down.

Comments

[realist.]

let me ask you, where are you getting your facts from? because it all sounds hypothetical to me; "lay off 50%- 100% of their staff"? bull. how in the world did you get those facts? or did you make them up? do you even have experience managing? a physician's pay cut does not at all mean the end of their company; so stop acting like physicians get paid dirt cheap. they are among the doctors of the world; they aren't living cheaply. stop trying to convince people that the end of the world is coming; you're just a writer trying to play off of fear. a boy who cried wolf, who has no managerial experience. get real.

[Don Elton]

I'm getting real. I write those payroll checks as owner of a medical practice. If the Medicare 21% pay cut isn't reversed it will affect payments from all sources as Medicaid is indexed to the Medicare fee schedule as are many private insurance plans. I'm not sure how many businesses that have a gross income of $750,000 and overhead of over 65% can afford to just cut their income by over $100,000 a year without having to make major changes. Rent is set elsewhere as are insurance and supply costs. Personnel costs are the only ones that can really be controlled and then too by a pretty limited amount. Do the math.

[IndependentBadger]

This "article" is hilarious. Doctors are the most overpaid people on Earth, outside of Wall Street. You could cut the average PM & R docs salary 50%, and they'd still be making four or five times what the average American earns. I love how you guys stop looking for "waste" when it finds its way into the pockets of rich people. Talk about class warfare. My folks and wife are doctors. We are seriously the most overprivileged folks I know. And even WE know that Obama's reforms are necessary. Heck, he didn't even really do much. No national health care. No public option. No changes until 2014. You can't honestly be serious when you pretend our current system is better. What a joke. My ma spends more time filling out papaerwork for private insurance companies than her counterparts do in Canada or England. And England's system is WAY more socialist than anything we need here. Get a grip. And you wonder why non-teabaggers laugh at you people...

[DE]

Overpaid? By what standard? You go to school for average of 12 years after high school and incur a debt of $100,000 to work 60+ hours a week and tell me what you think fair compensation is and don't forget you have to pay upwards of $20,000 per year to as high as $100,000 per year for malpractice insurance depending on your specialty. Get a clue - no wonder fewer people want to be doctors.