Must-Read: Nicholas Bagley: Wreck the RUC

Must-Read: Nicholas Bagley: Wreck the RUC: “The American Medical Association/Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC)….

…Rife with conflicts of interest and not especially transparent, the RUC is a specialist-dominated committee that ‘donates’ more than $8 million of its own services each year to Medicare, presumably out of the goodness of its heart…. Since CMS has been starved of the resources necessary to independently review physician services, the agency has little choice but to rubber-stamp most of the RUC’s recommendations…. Doing the job right would cost real money, but it’d be a pittance when compared to the $70 billion spent on physician payments in 2013. If we insist on running Medicare on a shoestring, we shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t work very well. Sometimes you get what you pay for.”