Doctors’ offices are charging patients 10 times more by claiming to be hospitals 
Even when patients never step into a hospital, they may be charged hospital “facility fees,” and their care may be billed at higher rates. washingtonpost.com/business/…

It's the doctors fault, gee, I hope no one sees that graph!

If you don’t lock in Original Medicare + a Medigap supplement during your one-time 6-month window when you first become eligible, you may never be able to get it later. Choose Medicare Advantage instead and, in most states, Medigap insurers can reject you for preexisting conditions (or ones you develop) if you try to switch back. Seniors I talk to almost universally don’t understand this and are enticed into Medicare Advantage plans with lower monthly premium sales pitch. They also don’t realize Advantage plans typically have higher medical copays than Original Medicare + Medigap Plan G. MA plans also apply much tighter management (prior auth + step therapy) to Part B drugs like chemo and infusions.

Aldeyra to File Formal Dispute with US FDA over Reproxalap Rejection: bit.ly/4AOfHjj

CMS pays physicians less for getting faster. The fee schedule has always worked this way. A procedure gets quicker, the RUC resurveys it, the work RVU gets cut. Cataract surgery has been revalued downward for thirty years on exactly this logic. The 2026 rule removed the survey step. A 2.5% "efficiency adjustment" now comes off the work RVU of roughly 7,000 non-time-based codes, recalculated every three years, on the assumption that you got more efficient whether you did or not. Now run the math from the practice side. Revenue per unit of efficiency falls, by rule. Cost per unit of efficiency rises, because the cheap gains come first: the next increment needs new capital, new workflow, more staff training. Declining return, rising cost, and the crossover point arrives sooner the better you get. Budget neutrality closes the loop. Whatever one practice saves in RVUs gets redistributed across the whole pool. The efficient practice funds the inefficient one and keeps nothing. Soviet planners had a word for this. The ratchet. Beat the quota and the quota goes up, so no factory manager ever beat it by much. The fee schedule is a ratchet. Physicians learned the same lesson.