Home Forums Discussions General Discussion MEDICARE and GOVERNMENT JOKE

What a joke that on my medicare patients i need to have 10 rx's done with eRX before june 30th. I have a minimal medicare population but I DON'T GIVE THEM MEDS!!!! I have 2 out of my total of 20 patients on any kind of med. So now the govt is telling me to just give them all meds so i can get paid what i deserve!

This is a great answer to a big big big health care problem in america...what a freaking joke!!! yes i am pissed. I am pissed at the govt, at obama care and all that are on his damn committees that are coming up with these stupid [censored] ideas!!!!!!!

Anyone else had enough of this crap!!!!

I don't live in china or canada or any other socialized/communist country stop telling me what the hell to do and how to do it right! I know how to practice medicine they don't!

When are we going to be stood up for...where the hell is the AMA ...oh yeah they never ever ever stand up for the docs so that is why they have so few freaking members...please don't tell me to join and make a difference because i was a member for a long time and all emails phone calls thoughts went unanswered!!!

Ketan,
I share your frustration with this mess. Because you prescribe so little,
you may be able to apply for an exemption by Oct 1 2011.

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/06/13/edsa0613.htm

If not, you'll need to have 10 different encounters with medicare patients before June 30, 2011 and use the code G8553 along with the office visit code. you can't prescribe 5 meds electronically for one patient on the same day and have it count 5 times.

So perhaps you could have a patient come in daily for the next week for their knee pain and e-rx meloxicam 7.5mg #1 0 refills each day. Ugggh.

More than a few patients came in the office in the past few days, and when asked if they needed refills, told us "I just had all my medications sent to the pharmacy by Dr. X". Dr. X being their dermatologist or cardiologist or GYN, likely trying to get those 10 eRxs done.

Ketan,

I am with you

Ketan

Our solution:
Opt out
Private contract
Charge whatever the patient can afford up to usual and customary (or, charge nothing if they can't afford anything, no risk of fraud charges).

Life is good.

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.

Everyone should read Dilbert -- it is the most intelligent current commentary on the state of bureaucratic affairs, and while not as thoroughly terrifying as Kafka, it is insightful and helps maintain a sense of humor about all this. Which for me, is the only way to adapt and survive.

Going outside of Medicare is not possible in most areas of the country -- most everyone out here is on Medicare, and even the ones who have the means would never pay out of pocket. The rich feel just as "entitled" as the poor, they just see it differently (unlike the undeserving poor, they earned their right to Medicare, etc.)

Bureaucracies are in business to stay in business. Not to make good decisions. Doesn't matter if it is Unkle Sam or IBM or Lockheed or United Health Care. A bureaucracy is a bureaucracy. I would take my chances any day with Medicare over United Health Care or Blue Cross. Medicare is just dense. United Health Care is devious and vicious. I also suspect they are sadistic, and are fully aware of and enjoy discomfiting physicians.

They invite us to play cat and mouse games with them. It's frustrating. Some days I want to quit, but then, tell me a better job!

Thanks all for letting me vent on here. I should do the knee pain thing lol...sounds like a plan. I only see so few medicare patients so again the reduction doesn't really affect me financially. It is the thought of jerk off politicians and lawyers telling us how to practice medicine. . .how about every lawyer who is a scumbag has to submit his/her bills to the government and then the government will pay them 1/3 of the bill and then take a year to pay them...then maybe something will get done..

again, i really do believe with the government getting deeper and deeper into all this, they will soon enough maybe next generation or the one after, doctors just not taking insurance and it will be a shitty system of cash based...great for docs, shitty for people who don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars laying around...

Please don't take me wrong, I think EVERYONE in america deserves healthcare, but the goverment only wants to make it happen at the expense of doctors...last i checked this was a business too...so here is a message to the government: PONY UP!!!! you get what you pay for...you pay crap, you get crap service for the patients. . .

ANd i can't ask my medicare patients for cash pay because i want to treat the population. . .ican't charge them 180 for a new visit and then 100 for each visit after that. . .plus injections. . .

i know you all are playing a small violin for me!