1. The Medicare physician fee freeze: what really happened?
- Author
-
Gerard J. Wedig, Janet B. Mitchell, and Jerry Cromwell
- Subjects
Service (business) ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Time Factors ,business.industry ,Health Policy ,education ,MEDLINE ,Medicare ,humanities ,United States ,Medical services ,Incentive ,Cross-Sectional Studies ,Fees, Medical ,Nursing ,Family medicine ,Rate Setting and Review ,Medicine ,Humans ,Professional norms ,Insurance, Physician Services ,business ,Aged - Abstract
Prologue: Physicians and patients play the key roles in determining the volume of medical services provided by practitioners. Physicians, as agents of their patients, render professional judgments regarding the use of medical services. Professional norms call for the provision of all beneficial services, but physicians paid on a fee-for-service basis have a financial incentive to provide more service (in contrast to doctors paid on a capitated basis, who have a financial incentive to undertreat). As physician practice has come under more intense financial pressure, there is some evidence that physicians have responded to fee constraints by providing additional services. In this paper, Janet Mitchell and her coauthors track trends in Medicare physician spending during the program's recent (1984-1986) freeze on fees for services provided by doctors. By examining all Medicare claims submitted by doctors from four states and extrapolating the data to the experience in all states, the authors found that the pr...
- Published
- 1989