White House Plans Medicare Changes
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Bush administration has plans for extensive changes to the Medicare system, the New York Times Web site reported yesterday.
The proposed changes would calculate Medicare payments based on overall hospital costs rather than on hospital charges and would reflect the severity of a patient’s illness, a shift that the secretary of health and human services, Michael Levitt, says would make payments more accurate.
But hospitals say that the proposal would cause financial losses. The New York Times reported that the changes could cut payments for technologically advanced procedures by 20% to 30%.
