Lisa Egbert, MD, an OB-GYN, is closing her practice, the Paragon Women’s Center in Centerville, Ohio, due to financial constraints largely driven by reimbursement challenge, Spectrum News 1 reported March 19.
Dr. Egbert operated her practice for nearly 30 years, according to the report. But in the last two years, she had stopped taking a salary entirely to cover practice operation costs.
“It’s like having a death in the family,” she told Spectrum. “It is a part of me that I’m still very upset to lose, to not have that opportunity to take care of people, which I so loved doing. I had to cover my staff. I had to cover my rent, my everything, my electronic medical record, my liability insurance, all of that had to come out of what I was being paid and, eventually, it got to the point that what I was being paid was less than what I had to pay.”
Dr. Egbert is now a member of the American Medical Association and is advocating for people to contact their congresspeople to urge them to act on physician reimbursement issues.
“It’s basically the big Goliaths, the insurance companies taking advantage of faulty numbers in congress and just continuing to cut and cut and cut until there’s no more to cut,” Dr. Egbert said. “I hope across the country we can all rise up and fix Medicare, because this is a problem.”
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