Le cartel discret des docteurs qui contrôlent  Medicare ( Et au Québec?)

By Haley Sweetland Edwards, Washington Monthly


An examination of the American Medical Association’s special committee that meets three times a year to determine how much Medicare should pay doctors for the medical procedures they perform:

In a free market society, there’s a name for this kind of thing—for when a roomful of professionals from the same trade meet behind closed doors to agree on how much their services should be worth. It’s called price-fixing. And in any other industry, it’s illegal—grounds for a federal investigation into antitrust abuse, at the least.

But this, dear readers, is not any other industry. This is the health care industry, and here, this kind of ‘price-fixing’ is not only perfectly legal, it’s sanctioned by the U.S. government. At the end of each of these meetings, RUC members vote anonymously on a list of ‘recommended values,’ which are then sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that runs those programs. For the last twenty-two years, the CMS has accepted about 90 percent of the RUC’s recommended values—essentially transferring the committee’s decisions directly into law.