Post by philunderwood on Jan 17, 2012 8:36:09 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=medicaid
Medicare’s Doctor (and patient) trap
Published January 16, 2012 | By Bruce McQuain
John Goodman poses a scenario for you to consider:
Suppose you are accused of a crime and suppose your lawyer is paid the way doctors are paid. That is, suppose some third-party payer bureaucracy pays your lawyer a different fee for each separate task she performs in your defense. Just to make up some numbers that reflect the full degree of arbitrariness we find in medicine, let’s suppose your lawyer is paid $50 per hour for jury selection and $500 per hour for making your final case to the jury.
What would happen? At the end of your trial, your lawyer’s summation would be stirring, compelling, logical and persuasive. In fact, it might well get you off scot free if only it were delivered to the right jury. But you don’t have the right jury. Because of the fee schedule, your lawyer skimped on jury selection way back at the beginning of your trial.
This is why you don’t want to pay a lawyer, or any other professional, by task. You want your lawyer to be able to reallocate her time — in this case, from the summation speech to the voir dire proceeding. If each hour of her time is compensated at the same rate, she will feel free to allocate the last hour spent on your case to its highest valued use rather than to the activity that is paid the highest fee.
None of us would ever want to pay a lawyer by task, would we (not talking about a will or legal document production here, but instead some form of defense against charges which necessitates a jury trial and requiring the accomplishment of many tasks)? We’d instead insist upon paying them for a package of services designed to do whatever is necessary to defend us to the best of their ability with the ultimate goal of us walking free.
Right?
So why is it we can’t demand the same of doctors? Why can’t we demand a package of services designed by them to address all of our medical problems?
Well if your stuck with Medicare or Medicaid, you’re stuck with government price fixing and payment by task, that’s why. First the price fixing:
Medicare has a list of some 7,500 separate tasks it pays physicians to perform. For each task there is a price that varies according to location and other factors. Of the 800,000 practicing physicians in this country, not all are in Medicare and no doctor is going to perform every task on Medicare’s list.
Yet Medicare is potentially setting about 6 billion prices across the country at any one time.
OK? Bad enough that Medicare has completely removed the price mechanism from the process. As economist Dr. Mark Perry notes:
These problems sound a lot like the deficiencies of Soviet-style central planning in general when the government, rather than the market, sets prices, see Economic Calculation Problem.
Exactly and stultifyingly obvious, correct? In fact, it’s something one shouldn’t have to point out. Nor, would it seem, should it be something that we’re doing either. But we are. You just have to remember, our government doesn’t care about history, because, well, you know, it will get it right where all these other governments have failed. Just watch.
If the price fixing isn’t bad enough, it has also hit upon a procedure that actually inhibits the delivery of good health care rather than incentivizing it.
Medicare has strict rules about how tasks can be combined. For example, “special needs” patients typically have five or more comorbidities — a fancy way of saying that a lot of things are going wrong at once. These patients are costing Medicare about $60,000 a year and they consume a large share of Medicare’s entire budget. Ideally, when one of these patients sees a doctor, the doctor will deal with all five problems sequentially. That would economize on the patient’s time and ensure that the treatment regime for each malady is integrated and consistent with all the others.
Under Medicare’s payment system, however, a specialist can only bill Medicare the full fee for treating one of the five conditions during a single visit. If she treats the other four, she can only bill half price for those services. It’s even worse for primary care physicians. They cannot bill anything for treating the additional four conditions.
So, for example, if you have diabetes, COPD, high blood pressure or any combination of a number of other chronic diseases, tough cookies, your doc can only treat one per visit – unless, of course, he or she wants to work for free on the others.
Don’t believe me?
[When Dr. Young] sees Medicare or Medicaid patients at Tarrant County’s JPS Physicians Group, he can only deal with one ailment at a time. Even if a patient has several chronic diseases — diabetes, congestive heart failure, high blood pressure — the government’s payment rules allow him to only charge for one.
“You could spend the extra time and deal with everything, but you are completely giving away your services to do that,” he said. Patients are told to schedule another appointment or see a specialist.
Young calls the payment rules “ridiculously complicated.”
That has nothing to do with being complicated. It has to do with stupidity overruling common sense and the stupidity being enforced by an uncaring bureaucracy. “Rulz is rulz, Doc”. Do what is best for your patient and do it for free – that’s one way to lower costs, isn’t it?
But don’t forget – government involvement will mean better care at lower cost. That’s the promise, right?
Instead government is now redefining “better” to mean “their way or the highway”. It has nothing to do with what is better for the patient or the doctor. It has to do with what is better politically. And, of course, better for the bureaucracy. In this case, that means squeezing the doctor for everything they can get at the expense of the patient. Since you don’t have a choice about Medicare when you reach 65, any doctor you see doesn’t have a choice about how he or she treats you.
The only choice you have?
Live with it … if you can.
~McQ
Medicare’s Doctor (and patient) trap
Published January 16, 2012 | By Bruce McQuain
John Goodman poses a scenario for you to consider:
Suppose you are accused of a crime and suppose your lawyer is paid the way doctors are paid. That is, suppose some third-party payer bureaucracy pays your lawyer a different fee for each separate task she performs in your defense. Just to make up some numbers that reflect the full degree of arbitrariness we find in medicine, let’s suppose your lawyer is paid $50 per hour for jury selection and $500 per hour for making your final case to the jury.
What would happen? At the end of your trial, your lawyer’s summation would be stirring, compelling, logical and persuasive. In fact, it might well get you off scot free if only it were delivered to the right jury. But you don’t have the right jury. Because of the fee schedule, your lawyer skimped on jury selection way back at the beginning of your trial.
This is why you don’t want to pay a lawyer, or any other professional, by task. You want your lawyer to be able to reallocate her time — in this case, from the summation speech to the voir dire proceeding. If each hour of her time is compensated at the same rate, she will feel free to allocate the last hour spent on your case to its highest valued use rather than to the activity that is paid the highest fee.
None of us would ever want to pay a lawyer by task, would we (not talking about a will or legal document production here, but instead some form of defense against charges which necessitates a jury trial and requiring the accomplishment of many tasks)? We’d instead insist upon paying them for a package of services designed to do whatever is necessary to defend us to the best of their ability with the ultimate goal of us walking free.
Right?
So why is it we can’t demand the same of doctors? Why can’t we demand a package of services designed by them to address all of our medical problems?
Well if your stuck with Medicare or Medicaid, you’re stuck with government price fixing and payment by task, that’s why. First the price fixing:
Medicare has a list of some 7,500 separate tasks it pays physicians to perform. For each task there is a price that varies according to location and other factors. Of the 800,000 practicing physicians in this country, not all are in Medicare and no doctor is going to perform every task on Medicare’s list.
Yet Medicare is potentially setting about 6 billion prices across the country at any one time.
OK? Bad enough that Medicare has completely removed the price mechanism from the process. As economist Dr. Mark Perry notes:
These problems sound a lot like the deficiencies of Soviet-style central planning in general when the government, rather than the market, sets prices, see Economic Calculation Problem.
Exactly and stultifyingly obvious, correct? In fact, it’s something one shouldn’t have to point out. Nor, would it seem, should it be something that we’re doing either. But we are. You just have to remember, our government doesn’t care about history, because, well, you know, it will get it right where all these other governments have failed. Just watch.
If the price fixing isn’t bad enough, it has also hit upon a procedure that actually inhibits the delivery of good health care rather than incentivizing it.
Medicare has strict rules about how tasks can be combined. For example, “special needs” patients typically have five or more comorbidities — a fancy way of saying that a lot of things are going wrong at once. These patients are costing Medicare about $60,000 a year and they consume a large share of Medicare’s entire budget. Ideally, when one of these patients sees a doctor, the doctor will deal with all five problems sequentially. That would economize on the patient’s time and ensure that the treatment regime for each malady is integrated and consistent with all the others.
Under Medicare’s payment system, however, a specialist can only bill Medicare the full fee for treating one of the five conditions during a single visit. If she treats the other four, she can only bill half price for those services. It’s even worse for primary care physicians. They cannot bill anything for treating the additional four conditions.
So, for example, if you have diabetes, COPD, high blood pressure or any combination of a number of other chronic diseases, tough cookies, your doc can only treat one per visit – unless, of course, he or she wants to work for free on the others.
Don’t believe me?
[When Dr. Young] sees Medicare or Medicaid patients at Tarrant County’s JPS Physicians Group, he can only deal with one ailment at a time. Even if a patient has several chronic diseases — diabetes, congestive heart failure, high blood pressure — the government’s payment rules allow him to only charge for one.
“You could spend the extra time and deal with everything, but you are completely giving away your services to do that,” he said. Patients are told to schedule another appointment or see a specialist.
Young calls the payment rules “ridiculously complicated.”
That has nothing to do with being complicated. It has to do with stupidity overruling common sense and the stupidity being enforced by an uncaring bureaucracy. “Rulz is rulz, Doc”. Do what is best for your patient and do it for free – that’s one way to lower costs, isn’t it?
But don’t forget – government involvement will mean better care at lower cost. That’s the promise, right?
Instead government is now redefining “better” to mean “their way or the highway”. It has nothing to do with what is better for the patient or the doctor. It has to do with what is better politically. And, of course, better for the bureaucracy. In this case, that means squeezing the doctor for everything they can get at the expense of the patient. Since you don’t have a choice about Medicare when you reach 65, any doctor you see doesn’t have a choice about how he or she treats you.
The only choice you have?
Live with it … if you can.
~McQ