Obamacare and the Medicare Bureaucracy: A Dangerous Duo

Kathryn Nix / September 10, 2010

While Medicare held the spotlight for much of the debate over health care reform last year, the changes to the health care program for seniors and the disabled that were most widely acknowledged were the $575 billion in cuts to the program.  These cuts threaten to result in reduced benefits or access to health care providers.  But this isn’t the only way in which the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect seniors.  In recent Heritage research, Clete DiGiovanni, MD, and Robert Moffit, Ph.D., lay out some of the other important changes to Medicare which could, depending on the direction taken in pending regulation, challenge the doctor-patient relationship and undercut physician autonomy:

Standardization of Care. The PPACA creates a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which will be charged with setting research priorities and advance studies of comparative effectiveness research.  Though there is no problem with advancing evidence-based research to influence medical decision-making, DiGiovanni and Moffit write that, “The key issue, to be resolved through regulation, is the precise relationship between providers’ reimbursement and plan coverage and the findings of comparative effectiveness research.. statutory conditions are not to be construed as “preventing” the Secretary from using such evidence in determining coverage or reimbursement.”  (more…)