Medicare primary care services

As the country continues to struggle with a reported shortage of primary care physicians, Medicare, the country’s leading consumer of primary care services, continues to experiment with how best to pay for primary care and address the disparities in compensation between primary care doctors and specialists that has led to this shortage. In general, Medicare takes two approaches:  introduce new billing codes that create incentives for primary care physicians to engage in – and get paid for – practices Medicare seeks or establish demonstration programs that facilitate the introduction of incentives for engaging in promising approaches to primary care delivery. [...]