Impact of CMS proposal on physician reimbursement

Earlier, I noted that CMS proposed simplifying reimbursement for office visits. One of the purported reasons was to reduce the amount of paperwork that doctors have to go through in order to be reimbursed. The New England Journal of Medicine published an excellent piece that analyzes some of the new proposal's impact to physician incomes. Understandably, while physicians are interested in having to deal with less paperwork, they are much less keen on getting paid less.

Somewhat at the crux of this issue is standardization and fraud: if everyone understood and abided by the standards, there could be finer granularity of reimbursement without Medicare having to worry about additional levels of documentation. However, since people differ in their understanding of what constitutes a more complex visit and since it is tempting for many physicians to claim a higher level of reimbursement than warranted, we can understand Medicare's desire for higher levels of documentation for higher pay. At the same time, that documentation generally does not go to help patient care. It will be interesting to see how this proposal plays out and whether the medical community will generally want status quo or reduced paperwork (and pay).