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Rural Doctors May Get More Medicare Pay

By Elizabeth Wolfe
Kansas City Star, May 15, 2003

The Senate voted Thursday to increase Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals in rural areas by $25 billion over the next decade.

To pay for the increase, the Senate would reduce fees paid for prosthetics and other medical devices, chemotherapy drugs and make beneficiaries start paying deductibles and co-payments for laboratory services.

The measure by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, was added on, in a 86-12 vote, to a bill that would suspend dividend taxes for three years and cut other income and business taxes. It still would have to be approved by the House.

Grassley said the measure "makes a clear statement that health care providers and hospitals in rural areas should no longer be penalized for doing more with less."

Speaking only for his own state, Grassley said the amendment would provide hospitals in Iowa with an additional $377 million and physicians $8 million over the next decade.

Physicians and health care facilities in rural areas long have complained that Medicare's funding formula pays them fees lower that what doctors and other providers in urban areas get.

The lower reimbursement rates have hampered the ability of Iowa and other rural states to recruit and retain health professionals, said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

Dr. Warren A. Jones, chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, called the measure a large step toward correcting the inequities between urban and rural providers.

Low reimbursement rates have forced health care providers in recent years to cut staff and offer fewer medical services, Jones said. An AAFP study last year found that one in six doctors were not accepting more Medicare patients.


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