Issue # 2

Medicare patients are going to be going to doctors that will be paid 5 to 10% less for having them as a patient. People are trying to come up with a plan to lower the cost of medicare but keep doctors doing quality work. Right now doctors get paid for how many patients they see not by how well they treat them. A pay-for-performance program was approved which lets medicare pay doctors 1.5% more if they report their treatments and if it is quality work. Administrators are going to work with medical experts to put in guidelines for what quality care is. People that support the pay-for-performance plan think that guidlines are a good way to have better communication on which treatments work the best. People that support this researched hospitals with the program and saw that they had 1300 less deaths from heart attacks. People that are against this don't think that federal officials don't know enough about medicine to decide what is the best medicine. They also say that 1.5% will not cover the wasted time and resources that have to be used to fill out the paper work for the bonus.



I don't think that there should be a pay for performance program. Doctors shouldn't have to fill out paper work to get a bonus when they should be doing their job right in the first place. Federal officials don't know enough about medicine to make requirements so they should just leave things alone. The government shouldn't have cut doctors pay in the first place because it's not their fault that not everybody can afford health care. If doctors get paid for curing people of their illness then why would they ever take a patient that smokes or is obese. Dr. Deane Waldman agress with that and thinks that pay for performance should stop. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deane-waldman/stop-pay-for-performance_b_233208.html

http://bryceholm.blogspot.com/2010/11/3-health-care-safe-to-eat.html

http://briannalynn22.blogspot.com/2010/11/issue-1-comprehensive-vs-incremental.html