For more than a decade, Medicare's administrators, backed bythe White House, have made periodic attempts to reduce the excessiveamounts the program pays for the relatively few pharmaceuticalproducts that it covers, most of which are administered in physicians'offices to patients with cancer. Medicare spent $6.5 billionto purchase some 450 covered drug and biologic products in 2001;reimbursements to physicians accounted for about 75 percentof those expenditures. Efforts by the executive branch of thegovernment to reduce these Medicare expenditures have been rebuffedby Congress, which has been reluctant to act in the face ofarguments . . . [Full Text of this Article]
The Government as Purchaser
An Unsettled Policy Environment
Effect on Beneficiaries
The Controversy over Practice Expenses
In Search of a Policy
The Fallout for Oncologists
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