Ben Buckman.net

Yesterday Congress was trying to pass a $250bn (over 10 years) "doctor fix," preventing a 20% cut in doctor compensation for Medicare patients (required by a '97 cost-saving law and years of kicking the issue down the road).

A $250 billion dollar appropriation to a single professional group seems a little troubling. So I did some fuzzy math.

WrongDiagnosis.com says there were "906,422 Medicare Part B practitioners in the US [in] 2004." Let's use Part B as a sample for all of Medicare and assume that number's basically the same today (though it's probably lower now).

$250bn over 10 years is $25bn per year. That's supposed to fill in the expected 20% cut. So if $25bn/yr is 20%, 100% of Medicare payments to doctors per year would be $125bn.

$125bn divided by 906,422 recipients equals $137,905 per doctor per year for Medicare alone.

I can't tell if this is an outrageous amount of money or not. I guess it's reasonable if most of these doctors take mostly Medicare patients whose primary source of payment is Medicare, then this money is those doctors' salaries, and doctors do need years of expensive training to practice.

On a related note, a friend asks, "when did we switch to 10 year totals? It makes everything sound more expensive." Good question.