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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (684820)	11/14/2012 5:36:46 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1583406

Government always sets fees for Medicare, although they go about it ass-backwards (which is why health care costs are out of control). Congress allocates a certain number of dollars for fee-for-service health care, then the RBRVS (Resource-based Relative Value Scale) is used to determine how much of the pie will be allocated for each procedure. A similar sort of procedure is used for hospital fees, but they are based on a different model DRGs (Disease-related Groups). I don't really know anything about the hospital side. The problem, though, is that the amount of money allocated is nowhere nearly enough to pay Medicare's tab; so, for providers to stay afloat, they have to to shift cost to private insurance payers, and that causes a persistent upward push on private insurance fee schedules. State Medicaids are more arbitrary in the allocation but essentially suffer the same problem. The bottom line is that by price-controlling half the market place, they've driven up fees in the other half for four decades now, and particularly in the last two. And they wonder why health care costs have spiraled out of control...