BLOGSCAN: Circling the Wagons Around the RUC

On the Care and Cost Blog, Brian Klepper suggested that the defenders of the RUC (RBRVS Update Committee) are getting worried.  He showed that a letter signed by medical specialty societies, but not the major societies that represent generalists, deployed logical fallacies in support of the secretive committee dominated by proceduralists that de facto sets payments to physicians by the US Medicare system, and which seems largely responsible for the gulf between payments for procedures and for primary and "cognitive" care.  His summation:

The arguments mounted by the AMA and the specialty societies are really nothing more than a vested industry’s efforts to preserve the status quo at all costs. (Think Wall Street’s apologists in this year’s Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job.) But this approach has brought health care and the US economy to the brink of economic catastrophe.


Averting disaster will require an approach that dampens or bypasses the voices of the advisors who got us here, and strengthens the voice of primary care, which overwhelming data show produce better care at lower costs.