With decreasing reimbursement and increasing medical liability costs, who needs the hassle?
The continually decreasing reimbursement rates to health care providers from both government and private insurers require the prioritization of financial resources to direct patient care.
The rising commercialism, driven in part by increasing expenses and decreasing reimbursement, has obvious consequences for the public: ballooning costs, fraying of the traditional doctor-patient relationship.
"Physicians are squeezed between rising costs and decreasing reimbursement," and they "see only declining revenue in the future," as Medicare and private insurers restrict payments, the American Medical Association said.
In today's health-care environment, operational efficiency is intrinsic to balancing the need for increased productivity driven by rising costs and potentially decreasing reimbursement.
Also, the low or decreasing reimbursement for imaging procedures due to economic difficulties and saving policies results in longer periods of use of specific radiology equipment as it becomes harder or impossible for specific departments to obtain new equipment from the responsible health authorities, or as the cycle of return on investment is extended.
When the income of health-care providers is directly tied to their productivity but not to their quality, this resistance to change could be particularly difficult to overcome in the era of decreasing reimbursement.
Greater clinical commitments and proportionally less research activity because of personnel shortages, expanding services within and outside the operating room, and decreasing reimbursement most likely played important roles in the declining number of US papers, as did a progressive increase in the quality of research submissions from other countries to these and other anesthesia journals [ 1].
Additional pressure is being imposed on emergency rooms as a result of hospital closures, which are occurring due to decreased reimbursements secondary to a cap of annual spending on health care and the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRG).
However, when adjusting for inflation, surgeons have seen decreased reimbursement rates over the last decade.
