The plain fact is that Medicare accounts for a fifth of the nation’s total healthcare spending. Physicians who turn their backs on that are endangering the long-run financial health of their own practices. And, sooner or later, the government will have to fix the Medicare reimbursement formula.
In the current economic environment, physicians across the country may soon be facing pressure - not only from Medicare, but also from commercial payers - to lower their incomes substantially.
The importance of primary care in restructuring our healthcare system is widely recognized. As a current article in Health Affairs points out, avoidable hospital admissions for asthma and diabetes complications in the U.S. are twice the average for advanced countries, and that isn’t because the United States has a greater prevalence of these conditions.
Major changes in the healthcare delivery system are coming, and they will affect every physician. The question is whether those changes will have the effect we all want or whether they will lead to unintended consequences that we don’t want.
The historic reform bill that Congress passed on Sunday will immediately affect physicians, but the impact will be much greater in the long term.
Many pundits have weighed in on the likely consequences of not passing healthcare reform, which is expected to come to a head within the next few days. But a recent blog post by Matthew Mintz, MD, an internist in Washington, DC, puts things in perspective for physicians.
