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Support Global Action on Aging!
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Rural
Doctors May Get More Medicare Pay By
Elizabeth Wolfe WASHINGTON
- 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. Copyright © 2002 Global
Action on Aging |
