Over the weekend, the Washington Post posted a great, long story about how Medicare and most private insurers are basically making up the prices they pay for services.
The short version is this: Medicare bases its payment for any medical procedure on an estimate of how resource-intensive that procedure is. One of the most important resources that goes into a procedure is a physican's time. So Medicare has the American Medical Association survey doctors about, for example, how long it takes to perform a colonoscopy.
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Health care reform will help reduce this type of abuse paying for prevention is a sensible approach
ReplyDeleteWhen third parties are paying the bill, being government or an insurer, no market forces are at work. We need to get back to a pay as you go system. the system as it is now is bloated, inefficient, and ineffective. The patient/provider relationship needs to be fully restored and it will take a while. Start by getting government out.
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