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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (24630)	9/1/2012 2:35:15 PM
From: skinowski	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Seems to me that if you want to evaluate and compare two RVU's you'd have to look at what factors were included to see if they were the right ones and if they were counted and weighted appropriately. Lane, I'll need to give some more thought to your post, but it occurs to me that maybe I see the reason for at least one of our difficulties in this conversation. It is NOT possible to "compare two RVU's". A RVU is a Relative Value Unit. It is a single unit, like a dollar. It is a widget, of sorts. It is a single unit (a widget) which is deemed to be equivalent to a certain volume of skilled service which requires a certain amount of time, effort, training, etc. I dont remember the actual numbers, but, lets say, an RVU is worth $20. In this case, if a committee takes a vote and decides that a regular office visit is "worth" 3 RVU's, that simply means that they believe the fee for the visit should be 60 bucks. If they think that a cath is a 100 RVU's - this means they price it at 2000 bucks. (those are not real fees, just an illustration). If you can procure some political support and replace some of the members of the committee -- you may get a totally different fee structure, reflecting the opinions (and interests) of the new group. And this would happen regardless of how thorough and scientific was the original work of William Hsiao of Harvard, the father of the RVU idea. They created an abstraction, a "widget" of healthcare services. They assigned a dollar amount to the widget. Then, they arbitrarily price services in those widgets. How scientific is this, in the end?? As we speak, I am coming to a better realization of just how silly the entire concept is. If they throw out RVU's and simply go back to using dollars -- nothing - NOTHING - will change. It's smoke and mirrors, meant to make Gov price fixing look "scientific".