Medicare regulatory relief bill gets first congressional airing

Physicians say that Medicare's paperwork burden is driving doctors away; the government fears the relief bill would aid the small number of bad actors.

By Gina Shaw, AMNews correspondent. April 2, 2001.

Washington -- In its first congressional vetting, legislation designed to alleviate Medicare's regulatory burden on physicians seemed to resonate with several lawmakers. But some representatives and government officials remain wary of the proposal.

The bill, dubbed the Medicare Education and Regulatory Fairness Act of 2001, was the subject of a March 15 House Ways and Means health subcommittee hearing. The panel's chair, Nancy Johnson (R, Conn.), said she hears "every day" from physicians and other health care professionals in her district that the regulatory burden currently imposed by the 130,000 pages of Medicare regulations is "not only unacceptable, but destructive."

AMA President-elect Richard F. Corlin, MD, agreed. "Physicians are creating documentation in their patients' charts often not for the benefit of the patient's care, but purely to meet the government's demands," he said.

Just days earlier, Dr. Corlin noted, he'd been the physician on-call to treat a hemorrhaging patient in a hospital's intensive care unit, and he found himself wasting precious time sorting through more than 30 pages of chart documentation that was, for the most part, medically unnecessary. "A few years ago, I would have been able to get the same patient information in just a four- or five-page chart, but today it takes 30 pages or more to comply with Medicare regulations," he said.

That didn't surprise Rep. Jim Ramstad (R, Minn.), who told the committee that until recently, the most consistent complaints he'd received from his constituents had to do with the Internal Revenue Service. "For the last couple of years, I've gotten the most complaints about [the Health Care Financing Administration]," he said. [...]