Guest opinion: Don’t reduce Medicare patient access to radiology scans

Sen. Max Baucus is absolutely right when he says, as he has repeatedly, that there needs to be a crackdown on waste and fraud in the Medicare program. Last year, Medicare wasted $48 billion in improper payment and some say the actual total of misspent dollars might run as high as $100 billion. Sen. Baucus is clearly on the right track.

That’s an approach we should encourage the senator and his colleagues to bring to their work on the newly-created congressional “supercommittee,” the panel charged with recommending $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures. The first priority of these members of Congress should be to identify and cut the wasted dollars and ill-conceived spending within government and avoid making cuts that will cause real pain to Americans who can’t afford additional hardship.

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