Special Deal: The Shadowy Cartel of Doctors Who Control Medicare

[antigop]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july_august_2013/features/special_deal045641.php?page=1

On the last week of April earlier this year, a small committee of doctors met quietly in a midsized ballroom at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago. There was an anesthesiologist, an ophthalmologist, a radiologist, and so on—thirty-one in all, each representing their own medical specialty society, each a heavy hitter in his or her own field.

The meeting was convened, as always, by the American Medical Association. Since 1992, the AMA has summoned this same committee three times a year. It’s called the Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (or RUC, pronounced “ruck”), and it’s probably one of the most powerful committees in America that you’ve never heard of.

The purpose of each of these triannual RUC meetings is always the same: it’s the committee members’ job to decide what Medicare should pay them and their colleagues for the medical procedures they perform. How much should radiologists get for administering an MRI? How much should cardiologists be paid for inserting a heart stent?

While these doctors always discuss the “value” of each procedure in terms of the amount of time, work, and overhead required of them to perform it, the implication of that “value” is not lost on anyone in the room: they are, essentially, haggling over what their own salaries should be. “No one ever says the word ‘price,’ ” a doctor on the committee told me after the April meeting. “But yeah, everyone knows we’re talking about money.”

[adirondacker]

1. Literally Sickening. God forbid they live on the paltry salaries of other industrialised nations and

Last edited Thu Jul 18, 2013, 05:02 PM - Edit history (1)

give up their third, fourth or even fifth home. Got to keep up with the corporate CEO's and Banksters.
I wonder how many sleep, and have orgies with big pharma and the insurance industry?