With all the changes happening in health care and the increasing weight of federal mandates and requirements, it’s easy to view the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as the big, bad enemy. After all, if they just left all physicians and health care institutions on their own, everything would be OK, wouldn’t it? It’s an occasional line of thinking I’ve heard from many esteemed colleagues and also appears to be a prevailing theme online too.
To be fair, this is the easy and default viewpoint for any physician or health care organization to take, as they feel crushed by bureaucracy and other relatively newer requirements such as meaningful use. It’s a classic “us” vs. “them” mindset, that I must admit I occasionally feel as well.
Recently, I was reading the comments section of a health care article, and was struck by one particular comment about how Medicare simply doesn’t have enough funds to sustain the current model. The particular viewpoint was as follows. It’s all very well for physicians to pine for the good old days of the 1960s to 1980s (or even more recent), but back in the mid-twentieth century, there were something like seven working people for every Medicare recipient. In a decade, that figure is going to be closer to 2.5. Do the math. Some figures even suggest that if current Medicare growth continues, it will account for over 30 percent of the entire nation’s wealth in just over 50 years, with total health care expenditures accounting for 99 percent of GDP! How can such a model possibly be sustained?
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