The Recommendations of the Physician Payment Review Commission

THE relations between Medicare and practicing physicians, increasingly conflicted by the economic imperatives of payer and provider, will continue to evolve this year on two related but separate fronts. One involves the government's continuing struggle to reduce the massive federal deficit. A second more fundamental development centers on proposed new policies, some sought by organized medicine and others strongly opposed by it, that would seek to rationalize Medicare payment levels through a physicians' fee schedule, enact further limits on balance billing, impose an expenditure target on physicians' services for the first time, and accelerate the development of guidelines for medical . . .