Obamacare

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Dermpath

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So with Obamacare passed, how will that affects rads, and what do you guys think our salaries will look like 10+ years from now?

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Theoretically we'll have fewer redundant imaging under ACOs, but who knows. HMOs failed, there's no reason to think ACO would do any better.
 
Theoretically we'll have fewer redundant imaging under ACOs, but who knows. HMOs failed, there's no reason to think ACO would do any better.

So what are we looking at salary wise? 150k? 200k? 300k? less, more? Looking for opinions here.
 
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One expert predicted that imaging would be minimally affected by this supreme court ruling but that the larger threat was the future "doc fix" bill for the flawed Medicare formula for physician payment. This will likely include cuts to reimbursement.
 
One expert predicted that imaging would be minimally affected by this supreme court ruling but that the larger threat was the future "doc fix" bill for the flawed Medicare formula for physician payment. This will likely include cuts to reimbursement.

Yes, I did read that article. I'm just curious when can we expect to know payment fee schedules for services, and will those ever be frozen or will they constantly change?
 
Double edged sword.On one hand there will be decreased reimbursement per study, though also happens without obamacare. On the other hand it will add 40-50 million to the patients pool which will increase the volume of imaging.
Overall, regardless of political opinion, I think we as radiologist should support obamacare. The very good thing about it is that they are very aggresive towards self referral.


Bottom line: increase salary for any specialized field will be an untrue dream in the near future. It is not related to obamacare or any other health care model. It is the result of economy. In obamacare we may see unchanged or minimal decrease in salaries for radiologists, but only because of increase workload. Probably only peds and family doctors see minimal increase of 5-10 percent, albeit with increase workload.


However, obamacare will decrease self referrals significantly as they have shown to be very aggressive against it. Don't forget that radiologists are the least self refferers in the chaos we have in medical system. Bringing business to hospital is better for us. For example, now more cardiac nucs is done by radiologist as it was classically done in cardiology offices and now has been trasferred to the hospital which atleast increase our share of pie.
 
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