These are the guys that just classified obesity as a disease
Medicare Proposes Cuts in Cancer Drug Payments
Tue Jul 27, 2004 03:24 PM ET
By Lisa Richwine
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Medicare officials on Tuesday proposed cutting payments to doctors for widely used medicines to treat cancer and lung disease by as much as 89 percent for some drugs next year.
The changes would save the government $530 million in 2005, officials said, but oncologists warned the reductions would force some physicians to reduce cancer treatment services.
Medicare beneficiaries would save $270 million thanks to lower co-payments and other changes, Medicare chief Mark McClellan said.
"Medicare was paying way too much when it came to spending for certain drugs," McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters.
For many prostate cancer drugs, Medicare was paying 50 percent more than a private insurer typically would, he said.
Cancer specialists said they relied on the higher drug payments to cover chemotherapy-related services that Medicare did not fully fund. If the proposed cuts take effect, physicians might lose money and stop offering cancer care, said Deborah Kamin, senior director for cancer policy and clinical affairs at the American Society of Clinical Oncologists.
"These cuts are serious," Kamin said in an interview. "They have the potential to disrupt patient access to cancer treatment."
To sum up:
Medicaid would pay for chemotherapy but not for some of the support treatments that go with it. Doctors would therefore increase the price of the chemotherapy drugs such that the auxiliary stuff was paid for in the inflated price. This is practice is to be offset by the reducing the payment they are willing to authorize.
I don't know exactly what the chemotherapy-related services are, but if they are necessary to treat the cancer I can't see why they aren't funded like the chemotherapy drugs are. It would be more honest to just say you're not going to cover them at all.
