VitalSigns Staff: September 2009 Archives

Health reform bills now percolating through Congress treat doctors as political nobodies. The bills fail to address tort reform, they either ignore or suppress the strengths of consumer-driven care, they play down the importance of health savings accounts, they do not seem to want to tell people what things really cost, they over-stress unproven savings from EMRs, they treat physicians as government surrogates. and they seek to pay doctors as Medicare and Medicaid rates, which doctors say would drive about 45% of doctors out of practice. 

Approval of the measures, the lawmakers suggest, would set off a legal battle over the rights of states versus the reach of federal power -- an issue that is, for some, central to the current health care debate but also one that has tentacles stretching into a broad range of other matters, including education and drug policy.