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Consider A Point In The Max Baucus Healthcare Bill

Some say it is a death panel in disguise. But what ever you call it, it is a bad item. This statement is found on pages 80-81 of the unamended bill put forth by Baucus. It might be altered or even removed, but no one will likely know that.

Now this is the bill which the Health Insurance provider, Humana, warned their senior policyholders about. That it would take away $500 billion from the Medicare fund, which is already headed for bankruptcy. And the health and Human services department hit the ceiling about it.

As usual the language is technical and ambiguous. Much of these phrases are purposely written thusly in order to be skewed to most any interpretation one would want. But here is what it says:

"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."

Translation: Doctors, whose total Medicare patients bills were in the top ten percent for the previous year, would be penalized by 5% of their Medicare bills. This is one doctor in ten. With no way to know where he stood in the average costs position. This would be a strong incentive for any doctor not to prescribe an expensive therapy or procedure. Thus, the physician becomes a part of the “death panel”. This is completely unfair in that doctors are not in a position to pick and chose their patients. One physician might, by pure chance, have twice as many patients needing or requiring very expensive procedures. I expect there would be a stampede of doctors referring patients to another who is specializing in the particular ailment encountered which would be most costly.

As I mentioned above, this is in the unamended version of the bill, but it will likely be in the final version also. If not exactly in this manner, something similar. The administration is totally determined to destroy Medicare, simply because it is, and has been, a political headache. But the governments in the past have ignored it, borrowed from it and added costs to it in order to garner votes for themselves. We need more Jesse Helms type legislators. Helms would do, and stand for, the right thing regardless of how unpopular it was. There probably was never a more disliked Senator by his fellow Senators, simply because he put them to shame. He always voted against congressional pay raises, refused at least one that was passed. He returned a portion of his expense allowances and always stood up for what was right. Not for what was politically correct.

From what we can learn of this Baucus bill, it has most of the undesirable things that HR3200 had, only in different words. I do not believe it has a public option as such, but you may rest assured there are schemes to, somehow, put the government in full charge...somewhere down the line.

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