From the Boston Globe, via the New York Times, comes this little gem:

Health economists are increasingly advocating a cost-cutting method known as “bundling,’’ in which health providers receive a lump sum to care for a patient with a particular medical condition, say, diabetes or heart disease. The House bill calls for the administration to develop a plan for bundling, while the Senate Finance Committee version of the bill gives it until 2013 to create a pilot program.
This type of payment system has been proposed in Massachusetts, which is struggling under the burden of universal health care. All I can say is, if you have a medical condition, you’d better hope you’re one of the easy-to-treat patients with that condition, because this payment system creates a pernicious incentive for your doctor not to treat you. If my doctor gets $20,000 to care for my heart disease whether I get $4 generic statins for it at Wal-Mart or a $25,000 bypass surgery, which one do you think he will recommend? What if the statins aren’t going to cut it? Don’t assume that doctors are going to take all patients and use the profits from the below-average-cost ones to pay for the above-average ones. They’re simply going to refuse to treat patients who need more work than the average Joe.

This is just another way in which “universal health care” will make care less available, not more.

reasonpharm.blogspot.com