Medicare changes don't affect cancer care: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legislation that cut fees doctors receive for giving chemotherapy to Medicare patients has not affected care so far, researchers reported on Tuesday. Some groups complained the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which cut payments to doctors, would prompt physicians to drop patients or cut back on services. But Alisa Shea of the Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina and colleagues found no evidence Medicare patients had to travel any farther to get chemotherapy, or look any harder to find an oncologist to treat them. "The Medicare Modernization Act took issue with the fact that oncologists were often reimbursed too much -- sometimes as much as three times what they had paid -- for the chemotherapy drugs they were giving their patients, and subsequently doctors saw those reimbursement... [read full story]