One look at my office tells you that I’m still taking Medicare patients: The worn carpet and peeling paint give it away.
Yes, Medicare’s payment rates are that bad.
The real threat of a further across-the-board cut of 21 percent only added to the old problems of “routine” Medicare cuts.
The program now pays $53 for a standard office visit; with the cut, that would’ve been $40. For comparison, Aetna pays $70.
Average Medicare payments to physicians have been relatively stagnant since 2001 (but reimbursements for surgery and procedures have been cut a lot). Meanwhile, average total physicians’ costs have risen 20 percent.
Number me among the many thousands of doctors who’d have stopped accepting Medicare patients if these new cuts had stuck. Indeed, more and more of us have had to draw the line just thanks to the “normal” cuts.
Consider it all another warning of what ObamaCare really means.
The 21 percent slash was to start Monday, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services delayed it for 10 days to see if Congress could pull its head out of the health-care sand.
The latest effort to pass a temporary “doctors’ fix” to avoid the Medicare cut was held up because leaders in Congress stuck it in a grab-bag measure that got stalled in the Senate. But the only reason a “fix” is needed in the first place is that these slashes are programmed into the law to take place every year so that Congress can pretend it has Medicare costs under control.
The annual “doctors’ fix” drama also highlights the worthlessness of the American Medical Association: The group spends millions each year to prevent these cuts, without ever getting at the fundamental absurdity of the law that dictates them. Its big idea for fixing that was to sign on to “health-care reform,” as if this weren’t a clear route for forcing all insurance into the failing Medicare model.
Again, even without the 21 percent cut, Medicare already underpays doctors significantly. That’s why MDs are dropping out of the program — leaving elderly patients with “insurance” but no doctors.
Last year, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found that 28 percent of Medicare patients looking for a new physician were unable to find one. A recent survey revealed that 65 percent of the 3,400 members of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons were referring their Medicare patients to other doctors; 60 percent were reducing the number of such patients in their practice.
Medicare is a mess. Even without the half a trillion dollars of Medicare cuts in “health-reform” bills, it’s near-bankrupt — that’s why it has to underpay hospitals as well as doctors.
Meanwhile, Congress’ oversight of the program is so irrational that we’re on the brink of rate-cuts that no one can defend. Everyone may try to blame the single senator who was holding up the latest “fix” — but how did the rest of Congress let it come to that?
Worst of all, Medicare is the program that “reformers” point to as the success that ObamaCare’s going to deliver for all Americans.
Marc K. Siegel is a practicing internist and a Fox News medical contributor.