Where does primary care fit into the overall health care reform efforts?
DIRECTOR ORSZAG: Primary care is obviously — or boosting primary care physicians is obviously one approach that seems to be effective, and the evidence suggests that, for example, a lot of that variation that you see across the United States is correlated with the number of specialist visits that you have and the ratio of specialists to primary care physicians without any corresponding improvement in quality. There’s been a lot of attention paid, both in terms of medical training and in terms of incentives for physicians. One of the key things that we could be doing, in this budget, we don’t want to pretend that we are going to reduce Medicare physician payments by 20 percent next year, which is what previous budgets assumed. But we are looking to reform the payment system for physicians to encourage quality. And part of that could involve encouraging primary care physicians. Q You want to see more primary care physicians? DIRECTOR ORSZAG: I would say the evidence, if you look at the
