Late last month, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives approved the Medicare Reauthorization and CHIP Extension Act (MACRA), a fiscally irresponsible approach to increasing the amount the federal government spends on Medicare’s physicians’ services. Medicare’s Physician Fee Schedule is tied to an inflation formula that is inadequate to pay physicians enough to keep seeing Medicare patients. While Congress has had to increase this amount every year, those increases have always been funded by offsets from other federal spending.
This is the first time politicians of both parties have ignored this rule, increasing Medicare’s physicians’ payments perpetually and not paying for it. Worse, gimmicks obscure the true cost of the bill. Further, the bill would centralize federal control of the practice of medicine along the lines of Obamacare. The bill faces a lot of pressure to pass the Senate next week, especially because Medicare will have to start paying doctors according to a significantly lower fee schedule on April 15. So, the Senate needs to fix the bill very quickly before approving it.
Read the entire column at Forbes.
Research and commentary from a former senior executive in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
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