Can House Calls Survive?

The number of house calls has been steadily declining for decades. The house call is now barely perceptible as a part of what American physicians do. Despite the aging of the population, Medicare's expenditures for house calls are now only about 0.2 percent of all reimbursements to physicians. A report in this issue of the Journal documents that although the house call has not yet vanished, it has become a rarity and is in danger of becoming extinct.1 From their analysis of a 5 percent sample of Medicare claims data, Meyer and Gibbons1 conclude that physicians made about 727,000 house . . .