Issue #2 - Insuring Quality Care for Medicare Patients
Polcymakers are devising a plan to reduce Medicare expenditures while Medicare patients still have access to quality services. As it set up now, doctors get paid on the quantity of their work and not the quality. If a doctor misdiagnoses a patient they will get more Medicare reimbursments. In 2006 legislatures approved a "pay-for-performance" system that allows to pay doctors a 1.5 percent bonus for providing information about the type and quality of their services. Supporters of this legislation want Medicare to reward superior doctors and high-quality hospitals for their work.
I agree that the Medicare plan needs to change. A doctor shouldn't be given Medicare every time that they help a patient. If they get more reimbursements for seeing one patient more than once they may begin to not care about the patient and they may tell them the wrong information so that they will have to come back and then the doctor will get more reimbursments. I like the "pay-for-performance" plan as rewards the doctors that do their job well and tell their patients the right information even if it means less reimbursments.
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