Baucus Bill Will Ration Health Care

I know that many have been screaming about death panels and health care rationing, and liberals have been saying that it’s all hogwash. But the bill being proposed by Baucus as a “bipartisan” bill would result in health care rationing for seniors.

Baucus proposes a scheme to “control costs” by reducing payments to the doctors who are in the top 10% of national annual Medicare costs per patient. If a doctor is in that top 10%, then he will lose five percent of his or her own total Medicare reimbursements.

Doctors will try to hold costs down so they’re not in that 10%, and spending on medical will trend downwards over time… and that means that necessary tests and treatments will be ignored because they would “costs too much.”
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=110710

As Burke Balch, director of the National Right to Life's Center for Medical Ethics, says: "This (part of the Baucus bill) means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least-expensive tests and treatments for fear they will be caught in that top 10 percent. Note that this feature operates independently of any considerations of quality, efficiency or waste. If you authorize enough treatment for your patients , however necessary and appropriate it may be, you are in danger of being one of the 1 in 10 doctors who will be penalized each year."

Here’s an example of how this provision would work to deprive seniors of needed medical treatment.

To bring Balch back into the conversation concerning the actual effects of the 10 percent health penalty on real-life patients, as well as doctors, he points out that this penalty for Medicare doctors "creates a moving target."

"By definition," Balch said, "there will always be a top 10 percent, no matter how far down the total amount of money spent on Medicare is driven." Say that 2015, the top 10 percent is anything over $10,000 per patient. In 2016, most doctors will scramble to hold down the treatments they authorize to avoid breaking that limit."

But the real possibility, as a result, is that the total annual amount of that limit will drop. So next year, doctors will try to avoid being in the penalty box for anything they authorize over $9,500. Burke Balch adds:

"As the process repeats, the next year might be anything over $9,000. The year after that anything over $8,000, and so on. It's a game of musical chairs, in which there is always one chair less than the number of players. No matter how fast the contestants run, someone will always be the loser when the music stops."

But Medicare doctors will not be the only losers. As the doctors struggle to keep abreast of the continually falling limit of the money they can authorize for their contingent of patients, consider what those patients will lose in the quality of their treatment.

So the Baucus bill has the equivalent of death panels and health care rationing… they just use that “top 10%” with financial penalties to force doctors to do the rationing. This doesn’t make things any better.