title: No association between Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services payments and volume of Medicare beneficiaries or per-capita health care costs for each state.
abstract: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently published data on Medicare payments to physicians for 2012. We investigated regional variations in payments to gastroenterologists and evaluated whether payments correlated with the number of Medicare patients in each state. We found that the mean payment per gastroenterologist in each state ranged from $35,293 in Minnesota to $175,028 in Mississippi. Adjusted per-physician payments ranged from $11 per patient in Hawaii to $62 per patient in Washington, DC. There was no correlation between the mean per-physician payment and the mean number of Medicare patients per physician (r = 0.09), there also was no correlation between the mean per-physician payment and the overall mean per-capita health care costs for each state (r = -0.22). There was a 5.6-fold difference between the states with the lowest and highest adjusted Medicare payments to gastroenterologists. Therefore, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services payments do not appear to be associated with the volume of Medicare beneficiaries or overall per-capita health care costs for each state.
authors.affiliation: Department of Gastroenterology, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, Ireland. Electronic address: Harewood.gavin@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Gavin C
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: Harewood
authors.affiliation: Department of Gastroenterology, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.
authors.forename: Omar
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Alsaffar
mesh_terms: D014487:Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S.; D005767:Gastrointestinal Diseases / Q000191:economics* / Q000628:therapy*; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006296:Health Services / Q000191:economics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007342:Insurance Benefits / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D014481:United States
keywords: CMS; Gastroenterology Practice; Practice Variation