Bipartisan Medicare Bill

Courtesy of Boston Globe

Recently the House passed a bill that would establish a new formula for payment to doctors. The payments would be increased by .50% every year through 2019. It was passed 392-97 in the House and is expected to be taken up by the Senate on Friday. The bill also allows doctors to receive bonuses or penalties depending on their performance scores given to them by the government. The bill was a bipartisan bill negotiated by Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Of the bill Boehner said:

This is what we can accomplish when we focus on finding common ground.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would spend $900 million less than if Congress decided to completely freeze Medicare payment rates over 11 years but would increase the deficit by $141 billion over the same amount of time.

Besides from doctor repayments the bill also would renew the Children's Health Insurance Program for two years and provides $7 billion to 1,000 community health centers, also for two years. While it is expected to be harder to pass in the Senate than in the House, Some Senate Democrats are unsure about the bill as that $7 billion funding is not to be used for abortions unless there are cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's life is in jeopardy. Pelosi, as a supporter of abortion rights, encouraged her fellow Democrats to support the bill as

The abortion language in the bill is already in place for community health centers and will expire after two years.

But there are some complaints on the medical side in regards to this bill. Dr. Don McCanne of the Physicians for a National Health Care Program said:

In the fervor to finally rid us of the flawed...model of setting Medicare payment rates, Congress is about to pass legislation that includes ill-advised, misguided and detrimental policies that could cause irreparable harm to our traditional Medicare program.

While president of the American Medical Association Dr. Robert Wah said:

The Senate must act... to stop a looming 21% cut in Medicare reimbursements that will force reductions in access to health care for America's seniors, military personnel and their families.

While I think that the most of the federal programs have their faults and misuses, Medicare included, there needs to be a change that would be for the better good of the average population. These changes seem well and good and if doctors truly want to help people they should accept that traditional methods are not always effective, and if they are it has an expiration date.

It is also nice to see that the two parties can work together and is reassuring that are system does work and can work when correctly done so. Medicare has been a program that is been around for a long time now and these proposed changes, if not approved by the Senate, will hopefully open the door for more proposed changes in terms of health care and health insurance.

Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/26/house-doc-fix-medicare-bill/70481156/

Other Sources for information:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/us/house-passes-bill-changing-medicare-fee-formula-and-extending-childrens-insurance.html?_r=0

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/03/19/house-leaders-push-deal-fix-medicare-payments-doctors/vLKZCt734SqUdCvQJebLIN/story.html