The Homa Files

Ken’s Take:  It’s still not obvious to me how putting the screws to doctors will “fix” the healthcare situation …

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Medicare’s price controls already pay only 83 cents on the private dollar.

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Congress decides each year how much it wants to spend on doctors, period.

If one area of medicine receives a larger slice of this pie, another must accept a smaller one.

The portion sizes are determined using a formula known as Relative Value Units, or RVUs. Medicare assigns an RVU to each of 7,500 billable services—in 2008, a colonoscopy earned 5.64 of these units, a hip replacement 37.66.

Then it multiplies a doctor’s total RVUs by some dollar factor, currently about $36, and cuts a check.

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Source: WSJ, The War on Specialists Oct. 6, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574443472658898710.html?mod=djemEditorialPage#printMode

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This entry was posted on October 7, 2009 at 7:13 am and is filed under Health Care / Medical Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.