Friday, March 4, 2011

Fixing America's Health Care Reimbursement System

First published 3/3/11 on Kaiser Health News
A tempest is brewing in physician circles over how doctors are paid. But calming it will require more than just the action of physicians. It will demand the attention and influence of businesses and patient advocates who, outside the health industrial complex, bear the brunt of the nation's skyrocketing health care costs.
Much responsibility for America's inequitable health care payment system and its cost crisis is embedded in the informal but symbiotic relationship between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the American Medical Association's Relative Value System Update Committee -- also known as the RUC. For two decades, the RUC, a specialist-dominated panel, has encouraged national health care reimbursement policy that financially undervalues the challenges associated with primary care's management of complicated patients, while favoring often unnecessarily complex, costly and excessive medical services. For its part, CMS has provided mostly rubber-stamp acceptance of the RUC's recommendations. If America's primary care societies noisily left the RUC, they would de-legitimize the panel's role in driving the American health system's immense waste and pave the way for a more fair and enlightened approach to reimbursement.