The TAKE BACK MEDICINE NETWORK consists of TAFP members, your families, your staff, their families and all members of the health care team, speaking in one voice to return the focus of the health care delivery system to the needs of the patients. Through a communications network involving e-mail, phone, and fax, we are collecting and disseminating information, and facilitating quick responses on both local and state levels whenever physicians’ right to deliver appropriate care or operate physicians’ practices is challenged.

We are chronicling issues and efforts that contribute to our ultimate goal. We urge you to keep TAFP staff informed. Click on the TBM Network link on the TAFP home page, www.tafp.org, to post news and events affecting your practice and your patients as well as specific problems you experience. The academy will gather these comments and stories and get the message to business and community leaders. We will also use this as a message board for news briefs. By banding together and sharing our stories and resources, we can make a change for the better in the state’s health care delivery system.

News story sparks Medicare debate

Sometimes it takes a spark to start a fire, and sometimes it takes a story in The New York Times. In the March 16 edition of The Times, reporter Robert Pear wrote an article entitled “Doctors shunning patients with Medicare.” The story quoted doctor after doctor from several different states explaining how they decided to stop taking new Medicare patients because they were losing money doing so.

The last quote of the story was from TAFP President-elect Robert Hogue, M.D., of Brownwood, Texas. Hogue told The Times, “I have a hard and fast rule. I don’t take any new Medicare patients. In fact, I don’t take any new patients over the age of 60 because they will be on Medicare in the next five years.”

The story outlines the state of Medicare and Medicaid, quoting a projection that by 2030 the Medicare roles could double. At this time of decreasing reimbursement and increasing need, Congress is considering prescription drug coverage for Medicare patients. The story says the Bush administration believes that any increase in payments to physicians must come at the expense of other providers, and that new Medicare expenditures should go to drug benefits or to aid uninsured patients.

The story has generated some extra media attention. The morning news show on Fox 4 in Dallas recently invited TAFP President Justin Bartos, M.D., to talk about the subject. Bartos said that in the 80s, he realized that to keep his practice economically viable, he had to limit the number of Medicare patients he treated and try to balance Medicare losses by seeing more patients with private insurance.

“I’ve worried about this problem for years and I’m surprised that it took this long to come to this point where we’re actually going to have some public discussion about it, because it is an important problem,” Bartos said.