Orshe

The clock is running out before a 21% cut in Medicare payments to doctors kicks in. Plans to block the reductions have gotten hung up in Congress.

As the dust settles on the White House announcement yesterday of its health-care overhaul, here are some further details worthy of note in the proposal:

Doctors have a fair bit of freedom in deciding whether to take on a new patient. But once they do, ethics and state licensing rules limit the circumstances when they can drop the patient from their practice, the WSJ’s Melinda Beck explains in her column today.

“You cannot abandon!” a former AMA official wrote to Beck, explaining that a doctor needs to give a patient a chance to find another doctor before discontinuing treatment.

The CBO budget report released today says the growth in Medicare and Medicaid spending during the next decade “will be somewhat slower than the average rate seen over the past 10 years.”

A meteorite crashed through the roof of a family practice in Loudon, Va., last week and landed on the floor of an exam room. No one was hurt.

(Insert joke here about how the sky is falling for primary-care docs.)

Walgreens is threatening to stop filling Medicaid prescriptions at 64 of its 121 pharmacies in Washington state because of state cuts in payments.

Walgreens, the biggest drug-store chain in the country, has been down this road before. It threatened to pull out of Medicaid programs last year before settlements were reached in Delaware and in an earlier dust-up in Washington state.

Sorry, one more New Year’s story to get out of the way: Top doctors at Mass. General and Brigham & Women’s — two of the most prestigious hospitals in the country — have to limit their financial ties to the drug and device industries under rules that kicked in on the first of the year.

The Senate’s vote on the health-care bill this morning set off an avalanche of responses from key interest groups. The short version: The AMA, drug industry and AARP backed the bill; health insurers and the Chamber of Commerce did not.

Here are some highlights culled from our inbox; links to the complete statements are included for the statements we could find online.

AHIP, the health insurance trade group:

The AMA came out in favor of the Senate health-care bill today. The support comes just after the Senate hammered out a major compromise that means the bill is almost certain to pass.

All year, Congress has been trying to figure out what to do about the 21% cut in Medicare payments to doctors that’s set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2010. The latest legislative maneuver would block the cut — but only for two months.

That short-term patch is tucked inside a big defense spending bill the House passed today.