It has been clear since the passage of Obamacare, with its ludicrous economic projections and Enron-accurate accounting, that the outcome of this gargantuan medical gewgaw will be enormous shortfalls in funding for healthcare. The long-term consequences of its financial chicanery are legion, from spiraling deficits, to drastic cutbacks in funding to hospitals and health care providers , to the hyperbolically-described “death panels”: restrictions in payment for health care services as determined by faceless bureaucrats, based on cost considerations masquerading under the paper-thin guise of “medical consensus.”

One of the most disastrous aspects of this plan, both economically and practically, has been the decision to provide coverage for the low-income uninsured by rolling them into Medicaid, the joint federal and state health insurance program for the poor. Medicaid in virtually every state has been an economic disaster, leading to massive state budgetary deficits, and reimbursements to physicians and other health providers substantially below the costs of providing services. This has resulted in the inevitable migration of physicians out of Medicaid, and increasingly from Medicare as well, as Medicare treads the same path of massive bureaucratic burdens on providers and sharply declining reimbursements. The end result has been a crisis of access, where covered patients under these federal programs are increasingly unable to find physicians who will see them. The massive expansion of beneficiaries in Medicaid will drastically worsen this access problem, leaving many, if not most, of the newly covered without health care.

In a classic statist response to this inevitable and impending crisis, our aristocratic masters have discovered, anew, the joys of coercion and intimidation in solving another of their self-engendered debacles:

Justice Department declares war on doctors

Today the Antitrust Division, joined by Idaho Attorney General … forced a a group of Boise orthopedists to accept price controls for worker’s compensation and HMO contracts as part of a settlement accusing the doctors of “price fixing.” According to the complaint, the conspiring orthopedists engaged in two antitrust conspiracies, which took place from 2006 to 2008. In the first conspiracy, through a series of meetings and other communications, the orthopedists agreed not to treat most patients covered by workers’ compensation insurance.

They entered into a group boycott in order to force the Idaho Industrial Commission to increase the rates at which orthopedists were paid for treating injured workers. The Idaho Industrial Commission sets the fee schedule that determines the amount that orthopedists and other healthcare providers receive for treating patients covered by workers’ compensation insurance. The boycott resulted in a shortage of orthopedists willing to treat workers’ compensation patients…

In the second conspiracy, all of the defendants … and other conspiring orthopedists agreed to threaten to terminate their contracts with Blue Cross of Idaho. They jointly threatened to terminate their contracts to force Blue Cross of Idaho to offer better contract terms to orthopedists.

The proposed settlement prevents the Idaho Orthopedic Society and the named orthopedists from agreeing with their competitors on fees and contract terms. The settlement also prohibits them from collectively denying medical care to patients, refusing to deal with any payer or threatening to terminate contracts with any payer.

To say this action is chilling is a profound understatement: the implications of this settlement are nothing less than the erosion and ultimate destruction of our current system of providing health care in this country.

At first glance, this appears to be a legitimate attack on a price-fixing scheme by physicians to increase their income. The reality is far more sinister.

The Justice Department, in cooperation with the Idaho State Attorney General, brought suit against the physicians under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed in 1890, it was designed to prevent collusion by Standard Oil and other oil companies to raise prices by creating monopolies or cartels. The Act and its application has been controversial since day one, and it has morphed over the years to address real or perceived commercial malfeasance far removed from its original intent.

The case against the physicians in Idaho represents a tectonic shift in the way government deals with the physicians they pay. As the Mises Economics blog points out:

This case is a watershed for two reasons: First, until now the Federal Trade Commission, not the Justice Department, has taken the lead in prosecuting physicians. Since 2000, the FTC has brought about three dozen cases against physicians (all but one of which settled without any trial). But the FTC only has civil and administrative jurisdiction; the Antitrust Division has civil and criminal jurisdiction. The Sherman Act makes no distinction between civil and criminal “price fixing,” so in a case like this, it’s entirely a matter of prosecutorial discretion whether to charge the doctors with a civil or criminal offense. Based on the descriptions in the Antitrust Division’s press release, there’s certainly no reason they couldn’t have prosecuted the doctors criminally and insisted upon prison sentences — and there’s little doubt such threats were made or implied to obtain the physicians’ agreement to the proposed “settlement.”

The second reason this is a landmark case is that the Justice Department has unambiguously stated that refusal to accept government price controls is a form of illegal “price fixing.” The FTC has hinted at this when it’s said physicians must accept Medicare-based reimbursement schedules from insurance companies. But the DOJ has gone the final step and said, “Government prices are market prices,” in the form of the Idaho Industrial Commission’s fee schedule. The IIC administers the state’s worker compensation system … This isn’t a quasi-private or semi-private entity. It’s a purely government operation.

What’s more, the Antitrust Division has linked a refusal to accept government price controls with a refusal to accept a “private” insurance company’s contract offer. This leaves little doubt that antitrust regulators consider insurance party contracts the equivalent of government price controls — and physicians and patients have no choice but to accept them.

Please read the whole article, in particular the update at the end. This settlement is nothing short of stunning.

Has the nickel dropped yet?

Virtually all health care provided in this country is contractual, whether by the Federal Government or third party private insurers. The consolidation of the insurance industry and the growth of government-funded health care — which Obamacare vastly expands — means that, with the exception of certain cash-based niches such as cosmetic surgery and Lasik procedures, physicians are legally obligated to accept the contractual fee for any covered service. The cartel in health care lies not with the physicians — who remain loosely organized if at all and prohibited (rightly and ethically so, in many ways) from unionization — but with the government and the insurance industry. The insurance industry closely tracks federal actions, both in regulation and fees — and hence both private insurance and the Federal Government collude in very real ways to fix physician fees.

In most areas of the country, a small number of major national insurance carriers insure the vast majority of patients not covered under Federal programs — thus leaving physicians largely powerless to refuse the increasingly austere payments these plans offer, lest they find themselves without patients. Thus the government and private insurance carriers are free to ratchet fees downward to the point where there can no no longer be economic viability for physicians. This is exactly the scenario under which the Idaho orthopedists declined to see patients — very reluctantly — who were covered under workman’s compensation, and threatened to withdraw en mass from their Blue Cross of Idaho contracts. They quite simply had no other leverage against the government/insurance cartel.

Now they have none.

It is important to realize that under antitrust law, there does not need to be a formal agreement or conspiracy to “fix prices” — collusion can be inferred by the behavior of competitors, to wit: if enough physicians in an area decline to see, say, Medicaid patients, because of unsustainably low fees, the Justice Department may infer that they are colluding to fix prices, and move against them with an antitrust action.

Checkmate.

It should not be difficult to see the inevitable outcome of this coercive economic thuggery. Physicians will inevitably be forced into large organizational relationships — primarily hospital-based (toward which there is a virtual stampede from private practice over the past 2 years) for economic security. But this financial haven will prove short-lived, as the endless financial pressures of burgeoning health care costs and spiraling federal and state deficits will drive many physicians from practice altogether as burdensome regulation and plummeting incomes ultimately drive the best and the brightest to find employment elsewhere. There will then be no doctor to see you — coerced or not — and the answer, as always the case in such government-engendered crises — must be a government solution: government-employed physicians. Hello, National Health Service.

Hyperventilatory, catastrophizing rhetoric? Right-wing extremist fear-mongering? Hysterical overreaction to loss of income? No, none of the above. Mark my words, we are witnessing the disassembly of the American system of medicine — a system which, for its many flaws, has provided the best and most advanced health care the world has ever known. For some, its destruction will be a victory, flush with the naive Utopian vision of universal, government-controlled health care.

For you, the patient, the outcome will prove far less sanguine.

In my prior post I highlighted some of the problems with Medicaid, the joint state and federal health coverage for the poor. In case you might think that physicians won’t participate simply because the reimbursement is so poor (which would certainly be reason enough), check this out, from my state medical society today:

The WSMA has complained to both the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Region X and the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) about the egregiously burdensome requests made of physicians’ practices by the Audit Medicaid Integrity Contractor (MICs). CMS has awarded the Medicaid audit contract for Washington to Health Management Services (HMS) of Irvine, Texas.

HMS is making unrealistic requests of practices in preparation of “field audits:” An eight page detailed request for information on each of the practice’s “providers,” with a 15 calendar day deadline; complete medical records on claims selected for audit, in some cases hundreds of records, and for records dating back to January 2004. Even worse, the lengthy list of records requested does not include patients’ names, only identification numbers and dates of birth!

So, let’s see: Medicaid pays far less than the cost of providing care, and often take 6 months to pay that poor pittance. For those dwindling number of physicians foolish enough to remain in this system, they pursue aggressive audits which require enormous amount of practice resources in response, and then, after such an audit, almost certainly will require large “refunds” of money “fraudulently” paid to physicians, who have failed to master the Byzantine and inscrutable regulations which no mere mortal can understand, much less comply with.

Is it any wonder that physicians are are heading for the lifeboats of this sinking vessel?

So, let’s move the uninsured in large numbers into this very same system, shall we?

The blogs have been abuzz about the big news from Arizona: The Mayo Clinic in Arizona will no longer be accepting Medicare patients for primary care.

The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government \'s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won \'t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo \'s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians…

I’m surprised it took this long.

Mayo Clinic has long had a well-earned reputation for providing high-quality care at lower cost than much of the health care economy, due in large part to their successful formula (closed panel, salaried clinic physicians, and the resulting tight peer review) which is difficult or impossible to reproduce throughout the highly-diversified delivery systems in U.S. healthcare.

But Mayo Clinic is now coming to terms with the hard economic realities of seeing Medicare patients: it costs more to see them than you are paid:

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government \'s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older…

For years, physicians and clinics have simply absorbed this cost, effectively using their cash flow from better-paying private insurers to cover their Medicare losses. And we have reached the point where this calculus is no longer viable — a line crossed some years ago with Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, whose reimbursements are only 60% or less of what Medicare currently pays.

What we have here is an unsustainable business model.

Typically, the folks at CMS downplay this reality, using the accounting chicanery so prevalent among our government bureaucrats, who love to piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining:

Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

Yes, the gap may have remained stable — but Medicare payment rates have declined significantly over the past decade. In 1997 the Medicare conversion factor per relative value unit (RVU) was $40.97; in 2007, it was $37.89 — a nearly 10 percent decline, without factoring in inflation — and not including significant reductions in relative value units themselves (which are purportedly a hard measure of the costs and value of the service provided, but in reality are frequently “recalculated” to reduce Medicare expenditures), and a marked increase in bundling (wrapping several services together and paying for only one). What has happened is that private insurers have followed Medicare’s lead and also significantly reduced their fees, which are commonly calculated based on Medicare’s rules and formulas, but at a slightly higher conversion factor.

So while the ratio may appear stable, the reality is that both Medicare and private carriers have been dropping their fees, while medical expenses (salaries, benefits, supplies, malpractice premiums, etc.) have risen significantly faster than inflation. So the income vs. expense curves are now crossing for many, if not most, medical practices, and Medicare patients are beginning to generate significant losses, while private reimbursements can no long cover the difference. The only economically sane decision to remain solvent is to cut back or eliminate Medicare patients. The result? Reduced access to care. Of course the politicians will take credit for reducing health care costs — caring for fewer patients will certainly cost less.

Who needs death panels?

This is simple economics, really — but far too difficult for our politicians and liberal policy wonks to understand:

Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute \'s Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.

“Some primary care doctors don \'t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said.

No, Medicare doesn’t just look like a poor payer — it is a poor payer, and doesn’t cover the expenses involved in providing the medical care it pays for — even for a highly efficient organization like Mayo Clinic. This idiot’s theory is that simply by increasing the number of primary care providers, competition will be greater, and more MDs will be willing to take less to provide care. Law of supply and demand and all that.

So if you’re selling TVs which cost you $500 to purchase wholesale at a retail price of $350 (and that’s the price the government mandates), opening new dealerships will make this arrangement more economically viable, through competition.

Where do they find these morons?

Not unexpectedly, Mayo Clinic’s jilted Medicare patients are none to happy, as they are being asked to pay cash (gasp!) to keep their physicians:

A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo \'s Glendale clinic will pay about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits, according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare patients at the Glendale clinic won \'t be allowed to switch to a primary care doctor at another Mayo facility.

A few hundred of the clinic \'s Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.

“We \'ve had many patients call us and express their unhappiness,” he said. “It \'s not been a pleasant experience.”

Mayo \'s decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix-area doctors who cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.

“We \'ve got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare patients in the hospital” because they consider the fees too low, Rivers said. “Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our practice.”

So Mayo’s trying to offload their Medicare patients onto other primary care physicians in the community, who no doubt will be more than happy to pick up these new financial albatrosses.

Best of luck with that plan.

The solution to this imminent disaster in access is not merely an increase in Medicare payment rates — Medicare and Medicaid are hell-bound for bankruptcy, and a few band-aids won’t stem the hemorrhage, but only make it worse. The imminent passage of “health care reform” legislation now bubbling in the witches’ cauldron of Congress will not only worsen Medicare’s situation — half a billion dollars are being cut from Medicare under the new legislation — but will instead bring this access disaster to private insurers as well. As their loss ratios are fixed by law at unsustainable levels, and community ratings forces them to accept high-cost patients without financial compensation for their increase risk and cost exposure, they will be forced to raise premiums to untenable levels — or drastically cut reimbursements to hospitals and physicians.

The system is a disastrous maze, and needs to be completely dismantled, and rebuilt from scratch. And the chances of that happening are zilch, zip, zero.

Welcome to the future of health care in America. Better stay healthy.