Quote:
The government will set doctors' wages.
This, too, seems to have originated on the Flecksoflife blog on July 19. But while page 127 of the House bill says that physicians who choose to accept patients in the public insurance plan would receive 5 percent more than Medicare pays for a given service, doctors can refuse to accept such patients, and, even if they participate in a public plan, they are not salaried employees of it any more than your doctor today is an employee of, say, Aetna. "Nobody is saying we want the doctors working for the government; that's completely false," says Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
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This is patently false. Here is what has been left out. What will be the rate of Medicare will be. Many physicians already refuse to treat Medicare patients because of the low reimbursement rates. You don't need to be a salaried employe for people who reimburse you to set your wages. Anyone who has been a contractor knows that. I am a contractor and although there is a little wiggle room on the job, it is within a narrow range. In some places that amount is set. You can choose to work for that or they will get someone else to do the job so in fact they do set the wages. The whole paragraph from Newsweek is smoke and mirrors.