ObamaCare: Embattled Doctors & Patients The New American
27.04.10
Patients will not be the only embattled ones. Doctors’ and facilities’ fights to collect payments will only intensify. Tighter government price controls, greatly enhanced reporting requirements, and more scrutiny are guaranteed. (Private insurers are increasingly tying their fees to Medicare’s, so a change in Medicare may affect most of a physician’s practice.) There is vast new funding for auditors, bounty hunters, and law enforcers to “find” instances of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which now include providing “unnecessary” services or ones that don’t meet bureaucratically approved “best practices.” Even if doctors do collect payment for a service, there is the risk that it can be “recovered” (taken) by electronic funds transfer from their bank account at a later time. Each recovery of discovered “waste, fraud, and abuse” could also be attached to $50,000 in civil monetary penalties, or
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