Opinion
Pay-for-reporting a shell game
LETTER — Posted July 2, 2007
Regarding "Medicare pay-for-reporting: How to get your 1.5%" (Article, June 4): Are you kidding us? In addition to counseling our 75-year-old diabetic, hypertensive, hyperlipemic, medically noncompliant patient about his erectile dysfunction and then figuring out how to get paid for all of that, we have to now learn "a potentially new set of CPT-II or temporary G codes that apply to a particular test result, outcome or procedure"?
Who does Medicare think does the billing in our office, the tooth fairy? This is a shell game using our tax dollars to pay the large medical groups who can afford to hire someone to code (lie) for them. Regular practicing physicians like us don't stand a chance of collecting on our (minuscule) bonus that, for our two-person practice, comes to about $1,500. How about an editorial along those lines in your estimable publication?
Nancy Somer, MD,
Jeffrey Rosen, MD, Woodbridge, N.J.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/07/02/edlt0702.htm.
