there is the negative of being a surgeon. Tough to opt out without taking care of any medicare patients at all. I could do it and survive but it would be difficult. Not because medicare pays me well, they obviously don't, but the referring docs don't want to have to try to figure out who takes medicare or who doesn't. They just want to send anything and everything surgical to me.
The ACS has just submitted, and it may very well get incorporated, an exemption status for we who either don't prescribe much or when we do, it is almost always narcotics. Occasionally I prescribe antibiotics for a post-op cellulitis but that is within the global period of the surgery and doesn't count toward e-Rx (whoever came up with that is an idiot).
Never let the government into healthcare. They cannot do it without bungling it up with a bunch of bureaucratic red tape.
My office has been fighting for 13 months to get paid on a VA patient who came into my E.R. emergently with a 2x4 through his leg. It has been silly. The first denial was because the patient should have been transferred to a VA facility (over an hour and a half away). What? Seriously? I had no clue his insurance status, I just knew he needed to be taken care of immediately.
