a definite decrease in paperwork and administrative hassles because she no longer has to file Medicare claims. Dr. Noyes says his revenues actually
Physician Practice Opportunities
We have exciting opportunities for board certified/board eligible physicians to join Covenant Medical Group. The ideal candidate should have experience and a Texas license.
increased because he has been able to fill those Medicare patient appointments with private-pay patients who pay at higher rates. And, he is seeing more patients per day because the privately insured patients tend to have less com- plicated visits that require less time. Still, he warns other physicians that
they must look at opting out of Medicare truly as a business decision. “You’ve got to look at your percentage of Medicare, how much you get from that, and how many of those patients you think you’ll retain if you go off Medicare,” he said.
Emergency Medicine - Lubbock, TX Endocrinologist - Lubbock, TX Family Medicine With OB - Littlefield, TX Family Medicine With OB - Snyder, TX Family Medicine - Denver City, TX Hospitalist - Lubbock, TX OB/GYN - Plainview, TX Pediatric Hematology/Oncology - Lubbock, TX Pediatric Intensivist - Lubbock, TX Pediatric Neurologist - Lubbock, TX Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon - Lubbock, TX Pediatrician - Plainview, TX
Covenant Medical Group (CMG) is affiliated with Covenant Health System in Lubbock, Texas. CMG is a multi-specialty group with more than 150 physicians across West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. We offer a competitive salary and excellent benefit package. CV should include salary requirements and can be forwarded to Covenant Medical Group, Attn: Kelly Fortney, 3420 22nd Place, Lubbock, TX 79410 or faxed to (806) 723-7476. For telephone inquiries, call (806) 725-7875. E-mail:
kfortney@covhs.org
30 TEXAS MEDICINE July 2012
“And once you have that, then you can decide if it’s worth it to stay in Medicare or not because then it’s more of a social question. Do you want to continue to take care of those patients even though maybe financially it’s better to not do it?”
sicians’ salaries for driving up the cost of health care,” said Richard L. Jackson, chair and chief executive officer of Jack- son Healthcare. “What this illustrates is that the compensation for American doc- tors is not what is driving up health care costs in our country.” The data was provided by Overseas Employment Development Board and a 2011 Physician Compensation Survey by Jackson Healthcare, a health care staff- ing and technology company.
Fraud, upcoding drive Medicare increases
U.S. physician pay among lowest
The United States may have a reputation for having one of the most expensive health care systems in the world, but it apparently is not because of physician payments. According to a study released in May
by Jackson Healthcare, payments to physicians accounted for 8.6 percent of U.S. health care costs in 2011. That was about $216 billion of the $2.5 tril- lion spent on health care. Only Sweden spent less on overall health care costs dedicated to physician compensation, with 8.5 percent allotted to the costs of paying doctors. Germany topped the list for physi-
cian compensation, with 15 percent of its health care costs going to pay physi- cians. Australia was next at 11.6 percent, France at 11 percent, and the United Kingdom at 9.7 percent. “As we continue to debate how to re- form health care, many often blame phy-
Rapid growth in Medicare spending on evaluation and management (E&M) vis- its in recent years has been driven partly by fraud and by more physicians billing for the most expensive types of those services, the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general says. Such E&M billing grew by 48 percent,
from $22.7 billion in 2001 to $33.5 bil- lion by 2010. That helped drive an over- all 43-percent increase in Medicare Part B payments to $110 billion from $77 billion. At the same time, physicians in-
creased their billing of more complex and more expensive E&M codes in all 15 visit types. The shift to costlier codes oc- curred in office visits, inpatient hospital care, and emergency department visits. In response, the U.S. Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to continue educating physicians on proper billing for E&M services and to encourage its contractors to review physicians’ billing for such services. The inspector general also encouraged CMS to review physicians who bill higher level codes and provided a list of about 1,700 physicians who billed under such costlier codes at least 95 percent of the time in 2010. Marilyn Tavenner, acting administra- tor of CMS, wrote that her agency plans to urge each Medicare administrative contractor to review the top 10 high bill-
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