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Medicare Prospective Payment and the Shaping of US Health Care
By Rick Mayes and Robert A. Berenson
245 pp, $48.95
Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006
ISBN-10: 0-8018-8454-3
JAMA. 2008;300(8):970.
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Robert Berenson, a physician and public policy veteran of the Clinton and Carter administrations, has joined with political scientist Rick Mayes to explain and update the significance of Medicare changes over the past decade. This should interest physicians, particularly as the authors are careful to explain how Congressional politics and organized medicine affect year-to-year changes in Medicare payment policies. The authors repeatedly provide evidence of how health plans and hospitals react to federal Medicare policy—a policy that drives all US health care cost containment. This undoubtedly does concern physicians, because the authors convincingly explain how yearly patches and fixes to proposed reductions in physician fee schedules are setting the market up for an unavoidable crash.
The analysis is spiced by sound bites and long quotes from the authors' interviews with more than 65 major US policy makers, such as Tom Scully, Gail Wilensky, Bruce Vladeck, Robert Rubin, and Leon Panetta, . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Prentiss Taylor, MD, Reviewer
Advocate Health Centers
Advocate Health Care
Chicago, Illinois
prentiss.taylor@comcast.net
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