NYT: Doctors Lobbying to Halt Cuts to Medicare Payments

Doctors Lobbying to Halt Cuts to Medicare Payments
By ROBERT PEAR

Published: April 4, 2005


WASHINGTON, April 3 - Doctors are mobilizing a nationwide lobbying campaign to stave off cuts in their Medicare fees as Congress hunts for ways to rein in the soaring cost of the insurance program.

Because of a quirk in federal law, Medicare will cut payments to doctors by 4 percent to 5 percent in each of the next six years, Bush administration officials say....

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Doctors said that if the cuts took effect, they would be less likely to treat Medicare patients because the payments would not cover the costs of care.

Dr. Nancy H. Nielsen, the speaker of the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association, said the cuts "would have a devastating effect on access to care" for elderly and disabled patients.

The association is urging its members to make telephone calls and send e-mail messages to Congress, which reconvenes this week, and it has organized a nationwide network of patients to "help stop the cuts." It has also devised posters for display in doctors' offices, saying that the cuts threaten "physicians' ability to serve Medicare patients in the future."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/politics/04docs.html

I'm sick of their whining. Health care costs are entirely out of kilter with the rest of the world, and it's time to bring the whole money-grubbing system to a screeching halt. We now have a medical system where millions of people can't afford to pay their outrageous medical fees. Many of these people are left to suffer or die. Meanwhile, doctors hide behind multiple layers of "gate-keepers" who block all but the chosen few with money or insurance. Now they're saying that reductions in Medicare won't cover the costs of their treatment. What a load of crap. Health care costs have been rising in the double digits for years, and there's no way that doctors haven't been profiting. Just look at their mansions. Enough!

I'm old enough to remember when doctors were in the work to help people. So now they're saying they'll drop their Medicare patients if their fees are reduced? To hell with them. Cut their fees and call their bluff. There are already tens of millions without access to health care. If doctors refuse to see their Medicare patients... well, the ever shrinking pool of citizens with access to medical care will suddenly become dramatically smaller. Maybe that's what it will take to finally push this purely money-driven health care system over a cliff. Bring it on!

There are a lot of MDs doing the right thing in the world. It's a shame you have to paint the good ones with the same brush you use for the bad ones. Not all of them live in mansions. The gatekeepers you metion are not on the doctors' or the patients' sides. They are the corporate masters of the US healthcare system who could care less about medicine, people, society--only profit matters.

The nursing home facility we'd just moved him to a month ago or so after he'd had an operation and was looking potentially to go down hill after that pushed us hard to get him onto hospice instead of being covered by Medicare and doing rehab. If one goes on hospice then only hospice care gets covered. Patient has to pay for room and board as Medicare will no longer cover them then.

Now when my Mom found another place that would put him back on Medicare and had cheaper rates if and when he were to be taken off coverage again, and was threatening to pull him out, they very conveniently today found a way to get him back onto Medicare coverage instead of losing him as a patient altogether. They took him off of Hospice today on Sunday and will get him back on Medicare tomorrow!

Between the lowering of what Medicare covers and places playing games with it, we keep having to pay more money! Of course if they lower what Medicare pays even further, then this place (and perhaps the other facility too) might have been less apt to try and get him back in Rehab and off of Hospice) if at some point it becomes a problem of them just losing money instead of reducing profits. I'm seeing this equation playing out before my eyes! It isn't fun when one of your family is feeling the consequences too! Isn't health care grand to us!

Isn't the U. S. the only, or one of the very few, so-called "modern, industrialized" countries that doesn't have some form of national or socialized health care and where it's illegal to die? Although I spent virtually my entire working life (I'm retired now) in the health insurance industry, I am strongly convinced that some other kind of system, other than one based on the amount of monetary considerations, is long overdue. Other countries that do have socialized medicine do not appear to be in the dark ages in regard to innovations in health care.