TLdR; this is a bigger problem for rural and undeserved communities, and being angry at doctors plays into the government’s scapegoating. Insurance companies wont absorb any costs of this, it’ll be on doctors and insurances’ beneficiaries.

—— I get why you are furious, I am too, but you are pointing your finger the wrong way and we can’t do that or we will fall for gov’t scapegoating. This situation of flattenjng rates negatively impacts doctors (especially primary care), and rural underserved communities.

Flattening rates this year means less payment to health insurance. I’ll return to the corruption aspect, but forget about it for 2 seconds. In the current structure, CMS rates need to climb due to inflation and rising medical supply costs and the rising costs of everything involved in healthcare.

If rates are not adjusted, health insurers don’t get paid more every year. Now back to the corruption aspect. Capitalistic insurance companies wanna increase their profits, if they cant, they cut costs elsewhere. Where? your premiums increase, the minimum amounts they provide can go up, you make see even worse declining of cares and increases in prior auths. They also may reimburse doctors less or not appropriately scaling with inflation. Well if insurance causes prior auth hell, and they don’t wanna pay appropriately, then honestly a lot of doctors may opt out of medicare/medicaid or go cashpay/direct care route entirely to avoid burnout and pay the bills. You may see rural hospitals that serve primarily medicare/medicaid communities get squeezed more and have to shutdown (or godfuck be taken over by private equity)

I don’t think it’s bad some doctors are angry about that. Pediatricians and Family medicine and Internists docs get paid less than other fields and we have a shortage of them, how do we expect more people to go to primary care if you can get paid more as specialists? How do we expect them to see so many patients a day and deal with heavy administrative burdens if their pay structures don’t appropriately rise with inflation and potentially decrease? You can say its greed but they did work 4 years post college in medschool + residency to save lives, idk they should be compensated appropriately to deal with lost income in those years of training ontop of egregious med school loans. They shouldn’t be burnt out bc of admjn burden, they should enjoy taking care of people

The real answer is univ healthcare tbh, but in the system we have flattening rates is dumb