By: John Cherf, MD, MPH, MBA, and Alex Paul
The United States has the highest per capita healthcare spending in the world. U.S. healthcare costs have outpaced inflation for several years. Over the past 20 years, the federal government has attempted to control costs—specifically Medicare costs.
Cost reduction strategies often focus on specific segments of the healthcare market. These segments include hospitals, outpatient facilities, labs, drugs, physicians, rehabilitation, durable medical equipment, etc. Medicare has unique fee schedules for the various segments of the healthcare economy. The annual changes to these various fee schedules have not been uniform.
The most striking finding among various provider fee schedule changes was the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS), which controls how physicians are paid by Medicare...> Read More
