Concierge Medicine Today

Launched with great fanfare, wellness codes leave docs frustrated.

By Cheryl Clark, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today

9.03.2015 – A huge victory in primary care doctors’ quest for better Medicare payment came Jan. 1, 2011, or so they hoped. That’s when six pages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act kicked in, authorizing three novel billing codes so that as many as 33 million beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Part B could receive “annual wellness” visits to help them thwart disease. Nationally, the amounts are significant, paying from $118 to $174 for each code, and possibly more in some locations.

That’s billions of dollars worth of care physicians couldn’t bill before. It pays not for dealing with patients’ symptoms but for reviewing their screening tests and immunizations, family history, cognitive and physical abilities, risk for falls, and for designing a “personalized prevention plan” for every beneficiary.

It is, said, Reid Blackwelder…