The Conservative Cave
Current Events => Politics => Topic started by: thundley4 on August 28, 2009, 08:24:49 PM
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Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- An Obama administration plan to cut Medicare payments to heart and cancer doctors by $1.4 billion next year is generating a backlash that’s undermining the president’s health-care overhaul.
While President Barack Obama and members of Congress have spent August debating health insurance and medical costs at public forums, specialists are waging what one advocate calls a “tooth and nail†fight against a separate initiative to boost the pay of family doctors, and cut fees for cardiologists and oncologists. The specialists, in newspaper columns and meetings with lawmakers, say patients will lose access to life-saving care, from pacemakers to chemotherapy.
The proposal by Medicare, the government insurer for the elderly and disabled, is an effort by Obama to focus U.S. medicine on preventive care. The fight by physicians who work with the most expensive patients is weakening support for Obama’s broader goal, legislation to remake the health system, said Mark B. McClellan, 46, a former Medicare chief.
“If you can make the health-care debate all about moving slices of the pie around, it’s very easy to generate opposition and very easy to get derailed,†said McClellan, a physician and analyst at the Brookings Institution, a policy research center in Washington, in an interview.
Obama and his allies in Congress are pushing to extend coverage to the 46 million Americans without health insurance, at a potential cost of $1 trillion over a decade. The separate Medicare proposal, announced July 1, slashes projected spending for care by cardiologists and oncologists by more than 10 percent each, while paying family doctors 8 percent more and nurses an additional 7 percent.
Bloomberg via Yahoo (http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20090828/pl_bloomberg/arqnpw9zinj4)
No rationing of health care will happen under 0BamaCare. :sarcasm: