, Columnist
Who Should Set Medicare Prices?
Pointing out the problems with Medicare is easy. Fixing them is not.
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Last week, the Washington Post published a long article exposing a secret that has been widely known to health-care-policy analysts for decades: The people in charge of setting the rates that Medicare pays doctors are...the doctors that Medicare pays.
" Unknown to most, a single committee of the AMA, the chief lobbying group for physicians, meets confidentially every year to come up with values for most of the services a doctor performs.