My husband is a physician and we have stopped our AMA membership ever since they endorsed the monstrosity that is “health care reform”.
I don’t get their thinking on this one. Okay, so they get better Medicare reimbursement rates now–which they surely need, but that’s only a subset of the population and Obamacare will eventually encompass almost everyone and those reimbursement rates will be even worse I fear. So, why sell their souls down the river for a few extra bucks right now?? I just don’t get it. I’ve even written them on this issue and they didn’t have anything useful to say. They tried to justify their position by telling me what the bill “doesn’t do”.
I am very fearful of what will become of physicians in all this mess.

My husband spent 11 years and $300,000 on his medical education (which we’re still paying DEARLY for right now) only to be told by the government that his opinion is not worth much more than the cost of a band-aid. We do and will always strongly oppose any government involvement in health care. The AMA has really dropped the ball on this one.

Just add another $500B of medicare/medicaid cuts and make the doc fix bill $750B instead of $250B. I mean as long as we’ve started down that road, then why not go all out?

It will be interesting in the Senate to see what happens when the GOP takes Reid’s separate doc fix bill that went down in flames when he tried to get cloture and proposes it as an amendment to the ReidCare bill.

I assume you are talking about H.R. 3961, the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009. I too, live with a physician who accepts Medicare payments, and he is fed up. It’s a situation where he is NEVER SURE how much he will be paid, because the re-imbursements yo yo all the time. This is NOT a pay-off for the AMA, only about 19% of docs belong to the AMA, mine doesn’t. This is what I received regarding this bill from the Executive Director from the Toledo Academy of Medicine, what I feel is a good explanation:

“This legislation would permanently repeal the sustainable growth rate (SGR)formula that calls for annual cuts in Medicare physician payments, and replace it with a new, more rational payment system.

In less than two months, Medicare payments will be slashed by more than 21 percent because of the SGR formula. Past short-term patches have only made the problem worse. This is the time to solve the problem once and for all, to preserve access to care and provide physician practices with the financial stability they need to help build a 21st-century health care system.”

How would you like it if you didn’t know what your paycheck was going to be every month? I believe if this bill does not pass, our seniors will be sorely at risk. It has been increasingly difficult in the Toledo area now to find a primary care doc who accepts Medicare patients, And in smaller communities it is even harder. Medicine has become an extremely difficult profession. Physicians have put tons on dollars into their education and unfortunately many are not even making any money, mostly because of malpractice premiums. To put into the mix a potential 21% cut in Medicare re-imbursements are going to force more to stop taking our seniors as patients. Yes, this will cost some bucks. But aren’t our seniors worth it? This is one area I believe “price controls” are in order. Please ask your Rept to vote YEA on 3961.

The issue with the Medicare SGR-mandated 21% reduction does not just affect Medicare. The ugly reality is that ALL insurers tie their reimbursement to the Medicare rates. So Aetna, as an example, may say that they pay 125% of Medicare rates. BCBS may pay 118% of Medicare.

Therefore a 21% reduction of Medicare immediately trickles throughout the reimbursement system — even for those providers who don’t see a single Medicare patient. I work as a biller/coder for general surgeons in Dallas, most of whom operate on a shoestring as it is. A 20% across-the-board reduction in income immediately means that several of them close their doors.

I don’t know what the answer is — fixing it is a cover for Obamacare, which is abhorrent. But so is losing access to care because physicians can no longer afford to practice.

What is the “problem” that needs to be fixed? Oh yes, the historically pitiful Medicare reimbursement rates imposed on physicians by the federal government. And now these very same people are going to “fix” the problem? To paraphrase The Dear Leader: The people who created the mess should just get out of the way. As a family physician, my average office visit charge is $95 and my average private insurance reimbursement is $90. That’s a contractual agreement to take a $5 discount per patient in order to have my name in their book as a “preferred provider”. That is my decision. On the other hand, my non-negotiable Medicare reimbursement is $61. My overhead costs are $57 per patient, leaving me a whopping $4 profit on which to feed my family. Can you see why so few family physicians are taking new Medicare patients these days? Only the federal government offers to suspend a planned 21% 2010 cut in Medicare reimbursement to physicians and calls it a “pay raise”. To his credit, at least Peter Orzag, White House budget director had the honesty to admit that this is the case. Don’t confuse the “AMA” with “physicians”. Most of us left the AMA years ago when their leadership left us. Today, less than 29% of America’s doctors belong to the AMA. The AMA has a self-serving (think socialist) agenda that left Hippocrates in the dust over 20 years ago. More physicians belong to Sermo, a web community of physicians that represents the true interests and beliefs of today’s doctors. As the blogosphere revolutionized journalism, so Sermo represents the future of medicine.