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The House is expected tomorrow to take up a $210 billion proposal to scrap the flawed formula that dictates Medicare doctor payments, thereby averting a 21-percent pay cut slated for next year.
If the proposal sounds familiar, it’s because the Senate considered a nearly identical bill just a month ago. That legislation was shot down, not because [...]

In a letter today to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors lobby, announced its support for House Democrats’ proposed health reforms. But there’s a catch. Namely, AMA isn’t offering its outright support for the $894 billion proposal — the one that’s getting all the media attention. Rather, the group [...]

Just announced from the office of Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the upper chamber will vote this afternoon to bring to the floor a $245 billion proposal scrapping the formula by which doctors are paid to treat Medicare patients.

But that’s what they’re getting.
With Democratic leaders hoping to bring up legislation to fix, once and for all, the formula to pay doctors who treat Medicare patients, a great deal of attention is being paid to the inconvenient fact that Democrats have not presented a plan to pay for the bill’s $245 billion price tag. [...]

The Washington Post weighs in today on the Democrats’ $245 billion plan to overhaul the way Medicare pays doctors — a bill Senate leaders are trying to divorce from broader health care reform legislation so they won’t have to find the offsets to pay for it. The Post editorialists are no fans of the strategy.
The [...]

Yesterday, Senate Democratic leaders began moving on a proposal to scrap the current formula dictating doctors’ Medicare rates and replacing it with a system more accurately reflecting the costs to treat those patients. Notably, party leaders appear poised to pass the bill separately from broader health reform legislation in order not to upend President Obama’s [...]

Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have been patting themselves on the back for passing out a health reform proposal that both saves money over the next decade and costs hundreds of billions of dollars less than similar legislation moving through the House. What often goes unmentioned is the inconvenient fact that the Finance bill [...]

The American Association for Justice — formerly known as the American Trial Lawyers Association — is gearing up to defend against proposals for tort reform as the answer to the high cost of health care.
“Limiting the legal rights of patients will do nothing to  lower the costs of health care,” said Anthony Tarricone, the association’s [...]

A report by Physicians for Human Rights released on Monday claims that U.S. physicians and psychologists betrayed ethical standards by collecting data on detainees’ reactions to abusive interrogations to as to improve their effectiveness. This would appear to constitute experimentation on human prisoners, which is a professional ethics violation for physicians. The group is calling [...]

Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have blasted it this week, but a $1.2 trillion House proposal to overhaul the nation’s health care system got an enormous boost Thursday when the country’s largest doctors group threw its weight behind the legislation.
In a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the bill sponsors, American Medical [...]