One of the most prominent pro-life groups in the country is claiming that the Senate Finance Bill on health care reform will lead to rationed care for Senior Citizens.
Burke J. Balch, J.D., Director, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics National Right to Life Committee has looked at the specific language in the bill and references pages 80-81 of the bill where it says the following regarding Medicare Physician payments:
"Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization. After five years, the Secretary would have the authority to convert the 90th percentile threshold for payment reductions to a standard measure of utilization, such as deviations from the national mean."
Balch's interpretation is below:
"The provision penalizing doctors establishes that for at least five years, Medicare physicians who authorize treatments for their patients that wind up in the top 10% of per capita cost for a year will lose 5% of their total Medicare reimbursements for that year. This means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least expensive tests and treatments for fear that they will be caught in that top 10%. 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. Moreover, it creates a moving target by definition, there will ALWAYS be a top 10%, no matter how far down the total amount of money spent on Medicare is driven. The incentive this creates is purely cost-driven, without any balancing of benefit. It will create a constant sense of uncertainty in doctors, since none can know in advance precisely what the cutoff for a given year will be resulting in still more pressure to limit treatment and diagnostic tests to the bare minimum."
David N. O'Steen, Ph.D,Executive Director of the National Right to Life Committee says the following:
"This is the cruelest and most effective way to ensure that doctors are forced to ration care for their senior citizen patients. It takes the telltale fingerprints from the government: instead of bureaucrats directly specifying the treatment denials that will mean death and poorer health for older people, it compels individual doctors to do the dirty work. It is an outrageous way to "reform" health care – by taking it away from America’s senior citizens."
Let's think about this logically. Let's say you're a mid-level manager for a company and you're boss comes to you and says,
"Bob, we want you to do a good job and provide the best possible product but we need you to watch costs . Now, as you know, we have 100 mid-level managers in this company and we have decided to implement a new policy: The top 10 percent of managers (10 of you) who do the worst job of controlling costs are going to have your salary reduced by 5%. So Bob, what we are basically saying here is watch the resources you use at work ( the helicopter flights for employees, the out of town trips, the lunches with clients, etc) Bob, we're counting on you!"
What do you think Bob is going to do? He doesn't want his salary reduced. He's going to find a way to streamline costs and trim back on resources. Employees will be affected. Food for thought
Look, if you're a skeptic you can discount National Right to Life if you want be be warned. This is the group that first brought up how the House Bill would allow for federal funding of abortions and it turns out that The New York Times, Associated Press and Fact Check.org all agreed. This group is meticulous in sifting through congressional bills. What they have to say should not be blown off. Will this be addressed?
You think this idea has the approval wink of Sarah Palin?
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