How Radiologists Are Paid: An Economic History, Part I: The Fight for Independent Billing.

In the first article in a four-part work, the authors review the economic history of how radiologists are paid, from the fight for independent billing in the 1960s to the impact of advanced imaging technologies on radiologists' incomes in the 1980s to the "bubble years" of the 1990s and to the end of the bubble in the first decade of the 21 century. The authors begin in this first part with the connections among a radiologist from Arkansas, a congressman, and the passage of Medicare, the program that gave radiologists the right to bill independently and gave the federal government a big role in health care spending.