Cataract Surgery Anesthesia

I recently heard about an insurance company that decided that it was going to stop paying for anesthesia services for cataract surgery. Personally, I have experienced many situations in which a patient gets anxious or uncomfortable during surgery, which causes that person to move around. A moving patient during microsurgery is not a good situation. When those situations have occurred, I have worked with an anesthesia provider in the room to make the patient more comfortable, which allows cataract surgery to continue without undue risks. If I didn’t have anesthesia to help me in those situations, I think that the risk of complications would go way up. I believe that anesthetists are necessary to make the surgery as safe as possible for that reason. I know that we are all worried about the cost of healthcare and that most patients don’t need anesthetist care during cataract surgery, but there are definitely those who do. It is not necessarily predictable who will need extra anesthetic care before we get in the OR. So while it is understandable that someone would propose removing anesthesia care from cataract surgery as a cost saving measure, I think that this is one way of trying to save money that is unacceptable. The most important thing is to provide safe care for our patients, and that can’t be compromised when trying to decrease costs.