How To Destroy Medicare!

I met with a group of physicians today who told me that when a transition from one Medicare fiscal intermediary (let's call it "NH") to another (which we can call "Palm")occurred in 2008 in Santa Clara County that they had no Medicare payments for 5 months. Not only were their incomes reduced to a trickle, they had to borrow money to stay in practice.

How many physicians, with this type of experience, will allow themselves to become more dependent on Medicare patients? Was this just an episode of incompetence, or a callous effort to move Medicare beneficiaries from standard Medicare to Medicare-HMOs?

Whatever it was, it bodes poorly for Medicare patients. And it speaks volumes about the Medicare bureaucracy.