Paying for assistants at surgery under Medicare

By Sally Trude

Subjects: Medicare, Cost effectiveness, Operating room technicians, Physicians' assistants

Description: "Medicare provides a separate payment to physicians billing as an assistant-at-surgery equal to 16 percent of the primary surgeon's payment. This report... presents a conceptual framework for considering the impact of [this policy] and describes patterns of physicians' billing as assistants-at-surgery. Finally, it presents a plan for studying the feasibility of incorporating payments to assistants for inpatient surgery within Medicare's payment to the hospital."--p. xi.