Bob Laszewski says "In the most amazing turn of events I have seen in 20 years of following health care policy in Washington, DC, the Democrats have the Republicans backed into an awful corner over the issue of the July 1st automatic 10.6% Medicare physician fee cut and corresponding private Medicare cuts to pay for nixing it. Also at stake is another 5% physician fee cut set for January 1, 2009."
Read his thoughtful blog piece.
Sometimes journalists are criticized for covering the "horse race" aspects of policy discussions. Sometimes, like this, it can't be avoided.
Great piece!
The comments are also very interesting, especially:
"Good primary care leads to lower costs for Medicare patients and the system as a whole. Without improving the primary care infrastructure, Medicare coverage will soon be about worthless."
The recent data on clinic performance in Minnesota for diabetes care is particularly telling. Chronic health condition treatment success is widely disparate as Athul Gawande pointed out in his famous New Yorker article on the bell curve. One way to make medical care less expensive is to do a better job on the low level, non-rocket science aspects of medicine. We don't need redundant new children's hospitals and the continued medical arms race locally that are fundamental to driving up medical care costs.
By the way, you've posted on the Stanford psychiatrist. Stanford got a B on the conflict of interest policy evaluation done by PharmFree. What do these two things mean about attempts to fix COI rules in medicine?