| John, It’s a colossal waste of your money. I’m talking about the policy that directs Medicare to pay hospital doctors more for the exact same service than it pays independent doctors – even if the service isn’t provided at the hospital. This policy weakens Medicare financially. It also leads to hospitals buying up independent practices, so they can get these higher payments. That leads to higher costs for everyone, not just those on Medicare.
Fortunately, there is a bill in Congress to end the dishonest billing. This bill would stop Medicare from paying hospital doctors an inflated price. Instead, Medicare would pay hospital doctors the same as independent doctors. In other words, the bill would make Medicare payments “site neutral.”
According to the experts at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, adopting site-neutral payments would: - reduce total national health expenditures by up to $458 billion,
- reduce commercial premiums by up to $386 billion,
- reduce patient cost sharing by $73 billion, and
- reduce the federal budget deficit by up to $117 billion.
You read that right. By ending the dishonest billing, the site-neutral legislation would reduce healthcare expenditures in American by almost half a trillion dollars.
Yet special interests are out to make sure this bill doesn’t see the light of day.
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