Medicare's poor excuse

It's bad enough that national leaders have allowed the system of health care financing to derail and rust. Now, it's positively galling for this bunch to refuse funding because of that same neglect, hurting elderly people in the process.

The news is that the Bush administration is proposing to cut by 5.1 percent the amount doctors are reimbursed for treating Medicare patients. This wouldn't be the first time fees were reduced, but with each cut, some doctors will simply turn Medicare patients away.

Those decisions can't help but limit some patients' access to needed care. Retirees moving into North Carolina already run into problems finding a primary care doctor who will accept Medicare payment for services rendered. The administration shouldn't make the situation worse, and especially without good reason.

Here's the explanation from Medicare spokesman Peter Ashkenaz: "We believe that the system itself is broken and that we shouldn't be sending money into a bad system; we should fix it." Unfortunately, doctors aren't waiting to bail out.

Elderly patients suffering multiple illnesses require the most time and attention from their doctors. That makes some of them costlier to treat. Reimbursement rates shouldn't be allowed to fall below the doctor's cost, but that's evidently what's happening. To let another cut reduce elderly patients' access to medical care -- just to make an ideological point -- would be heartless. Congress shouldn't go along with that.