I'm by no means an expert on this but the teaching rule was evoked in 1994 not sure why but probably to cut medical cost. It basically states that when a supervising Anesthesiologist supervises more than one resident concurrently on different procedures even for a minute he (the supervising Anesthesiologist) can only bill 50% for each procedure. No big deal until you realize that no other branch of medicine was getting penalized this way.
The bottom line is that because of the lack of reimbursement brought on by the teaching rule many Anesthesiology residency programs have had to shut down. That's not good when you consider the fact that the demand for providers continues to rise.
