Baucus Health Care "Reform" Bill Pushes Doctors to OK Rationing for Seniors

Baucus Health Care "Reform" Bill Pushes Doctors to OK Rationing for Seniors: "Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The Baucus health care 'reform' bill that is quickly becoming the potential alternative to the Kennedy bill and HR 3200 includes abortion subsidies and mandates. Additional analysis also shows the legislation includes health care rationing that would cause problems for senior citizens.

Burke J. Balch, an attorney and the director of the medical ethics center at the National Right to Life Committee, has examined the entire bill.

He points to language on pages 80-81 regarding Medicare physician payments as a concern.

'Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization,' the Baucus bill says. 'After five years, the Secretary would have the authority to convert the 90th percentile threshold for payment reductions to a standard measure of utilization, such as deviations from the national mean.'

Balch says the language clearly makes it so doctors are pushed financially into provided less care for seniors by being urged to purchase cheaper medical tests and phase out costly treatments.

'The provision penalizing doctors establishes that for at least five years, Medicare physicians who authorize treatments for their patients that wind up in the top 10% of per capita cost for a year will lose 5% of their total Medicare reimbursements for that year,' he explains to CBN News' David Brody.

'This means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least expensive tests and treatments for fear that they will be caught in that top 10%,' Balch adds."