Think Bush's Plan to Gut Medicare Is Dead? Think Again.. and Soon

For those of you distracted by summer, the Inconvenient Truth of this year's hottest-ever recorded temperatures, the crisis in the Middle East, Iraq, how you can't afford gas to get to work and how gas prices are making you pay more for everything, Newt Gingrich declaring World War III to help benefit the GOP at November election time, and so on, ad infinitum, here's something you need to know.

It's a bit of news that, everytime I approach someone to discuss it, almost NO ONE realizes: that Medicare plan that would gut the current system and pretty much guarantee the last of FDR's New Deal, Social Security, disappears, has NOT disappeared. Bush is pushing it very strongly, except no one but a few bloggers and journalists are noticing.

From the Times on his Medicare changes:

The Bush administration says it plans sweeping changes in Medicare payments to hospitals that could cut payments by 20 percent to 30 percent for many complex treatments and new technologies.
The changes, the biggest since the current payment system was adopted in 1983, are meant to improve the accuracy of payment rates. But doctors, hospitals and patient groups say the effects could be devastating.

Federal officials said that biases and distortions in the current system had created financial incentives for hospitals to treat certain patients, on whom they could make money, and to avoid others, who were less profitable.

Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, said the new system would be more accurate because payments would be based on hospital costs, rather than on charges, and would be adjusted to reflect the severity of a patient’s illness. A hospital now receives the same amount for a patient with a particular condition, like pneumonia, regardless of whether the illness is mild or severe.

Medicare pays more than $125 billion a year to nearly 5,000 hospitals. The new plan is not expected to save money, but will shift around billions of dollars, creating clear winners and losers. The effects will ripple through the health care system because many private insurers and state Medicaid programs follow Medicare’s example.

Dr. Alan D. Guerci, president of St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, N.Y., said the new formula would cut Medicare payments to his hospital by $21 million, or 12 percent. “It will significantly reduce payments for cardiac care and will force many hospitals to reduce the number of cardiac procedures they perform,” Dr. Guerci said.

Please, pay some attention to the man behind the curtain...