It's that time of year again...Medicare payment rates to doctors are scheduled to decline again unless Congress delays them. This kick the can down the road patch to one of medicare's major problems has been going on since about 1997.
The only way the government could seem to wring costs our of medicare was to cut what they pay to doctors for services making medicare patients more costly for doctors to serve than patients with private insurance. The result - as anyone who stayed awake for about 5 minutes in an introductory economics class would know - is that fewer doctors are taking medicare patients on. This drives medicare patients to use ERs and urgent-care facilities which in turn drives up the cost of medicare...anyone see a problem?
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