How will the legislation benefit physicians and their practices?
The legislation contains a number of provisions that, in combination, clearly benefit physicians and their practices. Recent AMA estimates suggest that physicians provided $24 billion in charity care in 2008, much of it to their uninsured patients. The financial impact this has on physicians’ practices is particularly acute when private and public payments are declining or flat, and physicians are less able to cover the cost of treating uninsured patients with revenue from insured patients. Expanded health insurance coverage to the uninsured, which the CBO has estimated will increase to 32 million more insured Americans by 2019, would help with the problem of uncompensated care. In addition, the time and cost burden of physicians’ interactions with health plans remains large. Estimates from 2006 suggest that physicians spend three hours per week, their nursing staff spend 19 hours and their administrative staff spend 36 hours per week interacting with health plans. In total, the annual
