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Article: Is Medicare killing private practitioners?: Doctors are leaving to work for larger companies, declining to take new Medicare patients or learning to live with less income.
- Article from:
- Daily Press (Newport News, VA)
- Article date:
- November 5, 2006
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Daily Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Cynthia H. Cho
Nov. 5--NEWPORT NEWS -- For more than a decade, Dr. John Kaiser worked as an internist in Williamsburg treating the kind of patients he liked most: people with multiple chronic problems. "I had no interest in seeing someone who was well and healthy and who needed a yearly physical," Kaiser said. A typical patient would have hypertension, diabetes and kidney problems. As it turned out, about 80 percent of his clientele were Medicare patients. Throughout the 1980s, his private practice was financially successful. In the early 1990s, he noticed his volume of patients was increasing, but his income was decreasing. He came to the ...