Uncertainty over Medicare pay sets doctors on edge

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Associated Press
via OneNewsNow.com
5/27/2010

For the third time this year, Congress is scrambling to stave off a hefty pay cut to doctors treating Medicare patients _ even as the Obama administration mails out a glossy brochure to reassure seniors the health care program is on solid ground.

The 21.3 percent cut will take effect June 1 unless Congress intervenes in the next few days. Recurring uncertainty over Medicare fees is making doctors take a hard look at their participation in a program considered a bedrock of middle-class retirement security.

If the problem is allowed to fester, it could undermine key goals of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, which envisions using Medicare to test ideas for improving the quality of care for all Americans. Doubts about Medicare’s stability can also create political problems for Democrats in the fall elections, since polls show seniors are worried about the impact of the remake on their own care.

“We will not have that cut,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., vowed Wednesday.

The article continues at OneNewsNow.

Read also Republicans criticize Obama administration brochure on health-care overhaul:

…In Washington’s political hothouse, one person’s recitation of the facts is another’s “gross misuse of taxpayer funds to provide biased information for political purposes.”

That’s the way Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and several colleagues put it. On the House side, senior Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee have called for an investigation, saying the brochure violates a legal ban on government propaganda…

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