Seeking the Cure for Medicare
After hearing a group of unhappy Oklahoma physicians this past weekend discuss the diminishing returns from the Medicare program, I came to this conclusion: If Congress keeps cutting reimbursements to doctors there soon may be very few doctors participating in the program.
In fact, one doctor at Saturday’s Medicare Forum at the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics stood up and said he was “opting out of the program.”
That may be just what some in Congress want, one doctor told me. The concept of a government managed health care program doesn’t sit well with some Congressmen, so they want to see Medicare die off and replaced with a privately run program. The problem with that scenario is that there aren’t any options on the table to replace Medicare.
At one point in Saturday’s forum, Dr. William Hazel, a trustee with the American Medical Association, asked the doctors, “who thought Medicare would disappear within five years?”
Not a hand was raised.
”We don’t have a replacement for it that works,” Hazel said. “We are on the clock. We have 16 and a half months before we run into a 21 percent clip (in reimbursements). The punch line is that to continue to have influence in the process we have to work together.”
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