President Barack Obama's health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.Remember how they shoved this down the country's throat in weekend and late night sessions? Remember how lawmakers admitted they hadn't read it?
By changing the way it pays, Medicare under the Accountable Care Organization rule is effectively mandating a new business model for practicing medicine. The vague cost-control hope is that ACOs will run pilot programs he successful ones will become best practices. While the program is voluntary for now, the government's intention is to make it mandatory in the coming years. However, the American Medical Group Association, a trade association of multispeciality practice groups and other integrated providers, calls the rule recently drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services "overly prescriptive, operationally burdensome, and the incentives are too difficult to achieve." In a survey of its members, 93% said they won't enroll.
That's what you get when you have a bunch of staff egg heads writing legislation fundamentally changing one-sixth of the economy.
Long after questions were first raised about the overuse of powerful CT scans, hundreds of hospitals across the country needlessly exposed patients to radiation by scanning their chests twice on the same day. Yet some hospitals were doing that more than 80 percent of the time for their Medicare chest patients. “If you do both, you bill for both,” one doctor said.So existing incentives under government rules cause this, but nobody has bothered changing it.
Medicare fraud -- estimated now to total about $60 billion a year -- has become one of, if not the most profitable, crimes in America.We've know this for years, as well, but it continues.
Certainly our healthcare system is screwed up, but are Washington bureaucrats the right people to fix it? Dream on.
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