Physician fee patterns under medicare: a descriptive analysis.

To describe physician fee patterns under a national program, we analyzed physician reimbursement rates for 39 medical procedures for 292 local Medicare reimbursement areas. The results indicate that the maximum prevailing charge for each procedure generally ranged from three to 10 times the minimum charge. Prevailing charges, however, clustered around the mean (coefficient of variation less than 0.50) in 37 of the 39 fee distributions for general practitioners and specialists. Although differences (P less than 0.05) existed between mean general practitioner and specialist charges for 27 of the 39 procedures, these differences were generally less than 10%.