More than 500 American Medical Association (AMA) delegates, waving “Fix the Medicare Mistake Now,” “Stop the Cuts,” and “Seniors Deserve Better,” stomping and chanting “Do you hear us now?” while the theme from “Rocky” blared in the background, sent a message to Congress today: no more Medicare pay cuts.
Medicare cut payments to doctors by 5.4% last year and plans to cut payments by another 4.4% starting Feb. 1, as part of a series of scheduled pay cuts that will bring physician Medicare pay levels down to the 1991 rates by 2005. Bad as that may sound, what has the AMA members hopping mad and many of the nation’s physicians threatening to turn away Medicare patients is the fact that the pay cuts are all caused by an “unintended accounting error” that crept into the Medicare payment calculations back in 1998 and 1999. The error involved underestimating the gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the index used to calculate Medicare payments, at the same time that Medicare bean counters failed to account for one million Medicare recipients.
תגובות רוצה להצטרף לדיון?
יש להתחבר כדי להגיב.
התחבראין תגובות עדיין. היה הראשון להגיב!