Two Medical Practices’ Reactions to MACRA Ruining Healthcare

Last week I wrote a post that discussed whether MACRA was ruining Healthcare. It’s an important discussion to have as we look at where healthcare IT legislation should go in the future.

In response to the article I got some pretty heated responses from medical practices that I thought were worth sharing with the wider audience who doesn’t get a chance to read the comments (yeah, I know that’s most of you).

The first comment is from Billy who said the following:

I wouldn’t say MACRA is ruining healthcare, but it’s starting to drive the decision train, which may be the first step.

From my corner of healthcare in America, our practice is forcing adherence to MACRA to set the tone for an ever growing portion of the workflow. The benefit from such is viewed as non-existent aside from protecting revenues. We have compliant doctors (with plenty of grumblings), but no happy ones that are doing this in the belief it’s good for medicine.

Taking two parts of your post I think I can speak towards in view of that…

“All of this leaves doctors I know upset with MACRA and MIPS. They wish it would go away and that the government would stop being so involved in their practice.”

They’re upset at the government because MACRA is seen as an intrusion with no benefit. At best, it’s a threat to their income (both to the business and their end of year salary), and at worst, they don’t trust the government entering the realm of “quality” which traditionally was limited to clinical relevancy. We’ve had plenty of internal discussions of how MACRA quality measures are worlds away from what the physicians view as truly important quality measures for their profession.

“Let’s imagine for a minute that Congress was functional enough to pass a law that would get rid of all of MACRA. Then what? Would doctor’s problems be solved?”

This doesn’t account for the primary reason MACRA was passed in the first place- controlling the costs of Medicare. They can talk about quality all they want, the government needed to eliminate the near automatic 2.5% (or thereabouts) increase in Medicare fee reimbursements. They do that with the freeze in rate increases, and making the physicians battle each other for what remains with the reward/penalty system.

Congress will never get rid of MACRA, it’s their plan to keep Medicare costs from blowing up until 2025 as the boomer generation keeps adding to the rolls.

So, MACRA is seen as having no benefit but a lot of downside in income and daily operations. About the only other thing that could have brought these emotions about would come from the IRS, but this is worse in some ways, as it’s forcing changes in clinical operations for the purpose of checking a box to protect income.

Welcome to the new normal.

It’s hard to think that Billy is right that this is the new normal. Should it be? Could we do something to make it so it’s not?

The next comment was from a long time reader who’s been commenting against MACRA and meaningful use before that (ie. a long time). Here’s meltoots’ take on the question of if MACRA is ruining healthcare:

Yep.
Count me as another mid career MD that sees the futility in any hope for the future of medicine. We are doomed. I do everything I can to talk everyone out of becoming an MD. Including my children.

We have 100% of the accountability and zero authority. Worse I am penalized by our government because I refuse to play stupid counting and clicking games. I was just discussing again (seems daily) my plans to exit this career. Too bad as I am one of only 4 orthopaedic surgeons left at our hospital. 20 years ago we had 35 on staff.

Every single person on earth seems to be saying all this data entry by MDs is silly, inefficient, useless, complex and frankly a huge costly waste of time. Everyone is speaking to burdens and the ridiculous nature of all this forced mindless data entry, super complex reporting, terrible auditing and penalizing for no good reason. When we look back a decade from now and wonder how we made medicine like the postal service, I know I can say I did try to point out better ways. But no one listened. At all.

If all these programs are so wonderful, tell me all the great things that have come out of MU, PQRS, VBM, QPP? So you got MDs to buy EHRs. Great. Everyone hates them. Great work.

HITECH set back real IT innovation in medicine at least a decade.

CMS touts patents over paperwork with absolutely no action, even worse, they made the MACRA program even more burdensome this year. AAPM, you want me to take even MORE risk, and hire more admins to run it? For 5%? Come on.

I have finally come to realization, that medicine has been destroyed by administrators, CMS /ONC, regulators, bean counters and the dozens of people I support just trying to stay ahead of the complexity. Its like the movie Office Space when I forget to click something in the 1000 clicks I have to do a day, I get 10 admins telling me about my TPS reports on what I did wrong.

What is really the worst part, is that I am pretty darned good at what I do, I am super busy and loaded with patients, too many. So I will be yet another MD, that has just had enough, that left the game in his prime. We should all be ashamed at what we did to our physicians.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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