Death by Committee

The goddamn health care bill hasn't even been passed yet and it already has a rationing mechanism codified in it. I really thought they wouldn't write this sort of thing in it, preferring instead to let it appear as an administrative decision, or at least for it to develop over time. Read this horseshit:

"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." Translated into plain English, it means that in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."

Full article here.

Pretend for a moment that you are a doctor. (Maybe you are a doctor.) Let's say that you specialize in age-related conditions; arthritis, cardiac care, pulmonary care. The day this bill passes, it's a safe bet that you will be in the top 10%, because you know that older patients require more attention and more expensive procedures. Your margins will be cut by 5 percent. What do you do? Take on fewer patients? Close your office every day at noon? You can't refuse to take on those 75 year olds, you're in medicine to help people after all and besides, it would be illegal to refuse care or the MediPolice will pay you a visit. If it's my practice, I would scale my practice down. The whole idea of forcing people to work more for less is an idea that could only be dreamed up in Washington. The rat bastards tend to forget that they work for us, not the other way around. Especially the control-freak Democrat rat bastards.