Problems with Medicare Reimbursement in Oregon

 Medicare reimbursement decreased 21.3% on April 1^st.   Before the reduction, reimbursement didn’t cover the cost of a visit to your primary care physician.  The House had voted in favor of the so-called “doctor fix.”  The Senate did not vote on it and left town for the Easter recess.  They will return to Washington on April 12^th.  Perhaps they will look at the issue then.

April 15th, President Obama signed the extension of the 0% cut retroactive to April 1st. This means that your physician can continue seeing you at last year's rates until May 31, 2010, and then the 21.3% cut takes effect.....unless "something" is done by the Feds.

 Regardless of the “fix” they still have not addressed the gross geographic disparity between various states.  The Dartmouth Atlas gives us some very revealing information (roll your cursor over the states and hospital regions within states). 

-The average Medicare payment per patient for 2006 in the US was $8304.

-In Oregon it was $6112, more than 25% less (26.4% to be exact). 

-In Eugene the 2006 payment was $5815.  This is 5% less than the Oregon average, and                30% less than the national average.

-It was 19.4% less than Seattle, and 45.2% less than Los Angeles. 

-And, unbelievably, it was only 35.6% of the reimbursement for Miami! (That’s 74.4% less for those of you from Rio Linda .)

This is why seniors may be having trouble finding a primary physician in Oregon.  Indeed, our esteemed Rep. for the 4^th District traded his vote in favor of the ObamaCare health bill to address this problem.  This involves “saving” $800 million of Medicare waste, and using $800 million to “address” the problem.  Here is a quote from the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems : “The lawmakers noted that Sebelius has promised the following steps:

• Institute of Medicine (IOM) study to reform the Medicare system to address all geographic disparities for doctors and hospitals and implementation of IOM recommendations by December 2012.
• IOM study based on Braley's house-passed language making firm recommendations to move toward high quality, low cost care across the health care sector and implementation of the recommendations, as part of the new Independent Payment Advisory Board, by 2014.
• Additional direction to the new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to further test innovative models to incent high quality, low cost care across the provider spectrum.
• A personal commitment from Sebelius to convene a National Summit on Geographic Variation, Cost, Access and Value in Health Care later this year."

Don’t hold your breath. Or, I’ll believe it when I see it. I can guarantee that I will be out of practice before anything is done.  In the meantime, take care of yourself: keep trim, exercise, and eat right.

Do you really want to have the government run all of health care given this information?  Remember the Federal government has been improving and refining and developing Medicare since 1965.