Sunday, January 28, 2007

1 Comments:

"Physicians are being paid less by health insurers"

Question: paid less per procedure or per visit? Or paid less total income?

Regardless of the answer, physician income per se is not usually the principal factor driving increases in health care premiums. Premiums are responding to the continuing overall increase to the cost of health care driven mainly by rising costs for hospital care, (inpatient and outpatient), pharmacy, lab, and high-tech imaging. In turn these rising costs reflect well-documented increases in utilization of services plus the introduction of newer and more expensive types of diagnostic tools, treatments and medicines. Physicians do not derive income from these types of service (they do order them however).

I doubt that there are data to support the notion that overall health care costs are actually diminishing. In fact,I'm pretty sure health care costs overall are increasing - as they have for the past 40 years or so. So long as overall health care costs increase, so will health insurance premiums.

John Fembup

By  Anonymous, at 9:16 AM  

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