Biomet CEO Jeff Binder worries that healthcare rationing is already in practice, a growing trend spurred by policies enacted over recent years to curb the rising cost of care.
Binder, speaking at a panel on AdvaMed’s annual conference in Boston on payment and healthcare delivery said he was, "concerned with the approach we’re seeing. The only way these [cost containment] issues will be addressed over time is with rationing."
"We’re already seeing some of those today, what I would call the softer approaches to rationing. For example, some of the RAC audits that you’re seeing out of Medicare, which have the effect of deferring or stymieing utilization. In the longer term what we’re most concerned with is an element of the bundling program called gain sharing."
Medicare Recovery Audit Contractors or RAC audits are post-payment reviews of physicians by Medicare, presumably to protect against fraud.
Gain sharing, as Binder said, is an incentive program in which physicians receive payment if their healthcare group is successful in reducing costs.
Binder said the practices are unnecessary given safeguards that are already in place to combat over-utilization.
"Our industry has been under a lot of pressure in regards to managing the way we deal with healthcare professionals and there are very important rules on kickbacks that ensure companies cannot provide perverse incentives to doctors to change the way that they practice medicine. "