Doctors Need a Permanent Fix to the Medicare Payment Mess

Kathryn Nix / May 04, 2011

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will consider solutions to Medicare’s flawed physician payment scheme. Physician payment is annually updated on the basis of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), a special economic formula which, as configured today, would result in deep annual payment cuts.

This directly threatens seniors’ access to care as it becomes financially infeasible for doctors to continue to take new Medicare patients under progressively lower payments. The problem will only get worse in the future, and it represents one of the most poignant examples of the negative impact of central planning on doctors and patients under the current Medicare program. (more…)