Favorite Quotes
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ====
Nov - 15
Dec - 19
Jan - 21
Feb - 8
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Wow – I finally understand the SGR mess
2 Jul2009
I always wondered why the SGR formula accelerated so quickly. Now I understand.
Medicare May Shuffle the Deck on Doctor Payments
Most of the money that Medicare pays physicians is for doctor visits, medical procedures and the like. But Medicare also pays physicians directly for drugs that are administered at doctors’ offices. Today, the agency that runs Medicare said it wanted to move the payments for those drugs out of the bucket of money allotted to physician payments, and into a different bucket.
The AMA has been pushing for this shift for years, because the cost of physician-administered drugs (which include expensive new cancer drugs, for example) has risen faster than the cost of doctors’ services.
But beyond making the a powerful lobby happy, the shift could make it politically easier for Congress to wade in, get rid of SGR and replace it with a new system, as many have called for.
If those drug costs are no longer included in the overall cost of payments to physicians, then Medicare’s total cost of paying physicians could fall by $87.5 billion over the next decade, according to a CBO estimate cited today by The Hill.
That would make any fix to SGR a bit easier to swallow — even if didn’t reduce Medicare’s overall spending.
I hope that helps others.
Related posts:
- Primary care payment – is win-win possible?
- Universal health care will require fair pay for primary care
- Finding enough primary care
- Could primary care actually win?
- Time – what the suits do not understand
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- In: Medical Rants
2 Responses to Wow – I finally understand the SGR mess
Web Media Daily – Thurs. July 2, 2009 | Reinventing Yourself...
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:31 am
[...] Wow – I finally understand the SGR mess …DB’s Medical Rants [...]
Phillip Madonia
July 18th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
What does SGR stand for?