Saturday, September 26, 2009

Not "Death Panels"; Rationed-Life Panels, Instead!

No surprise that a large number of MD's are thinking of retirement.

pages 80-81 of the [Senate Finance] bill. There it says: " "Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."

The flaw here is obvious, except to BigGummint people who are Simply Smarter Than You Are.

Is the doc in the 'top 10' because he's a crook? Because he has really, really, really sick patients? Because he and the patients live in a very high-cost-of-living area? Or some combination of the above?

Makes no difference to those who are Simply Smarter Than You Are.

Ration those damn sick oldsters.......until they are dead.

By the way, did we ever mention "subsidiarity"?

HT: PowerLine

2 comments:

Shoebox said...

Dad, if you follow the math on this, the provision has another implication. If you reduce those in the highest 10%, the following years, the highest 10% now does bracket creep downward. By continually squeezing the top down, the average gets pushed down and at some point, no one is making anything in this system.

Dad29 said...

Like I said, 'no wonder docs want to retire now.'