I don’t know about you but I am emotionally exhausted thinking about and worrying about the on-again off-again cuts in Medicare fees for physicians.
Here’s the scoop: late Thursday evening, June 24, 2010, the House of Representatives passed the ” Preservation of Access to Care for Medicare Beneficiaries and Pension Relief Act of 2010 (H.R. 3962)” which includes a delay in the 21+% fee cut. Because the same legislation was already passed by the Senate, it now goes to the President for his signature and it becomes law. It is anticipated that this will happen quickly and CMS will have the MACs start processing new claims with dates of service of June 1, 2010 and later at the 2009 fee schedule plus a 2.2% increase. The MACs will also have to reprocess the claims already paid for dates of service June 1, 2010 and later that were processed with 2010 fee schedule and that big fat cut.
Q: What should we be doing for the next 5 months and 6 days?
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
A: Have someone in your practice take a video of your providers introducing themselves, telling how many Medicare patients they have and how they can’t afford to see Medicare patients unless the SGR formula is replaced with something that works. The video doesn’t have to be slick – just real. Send it to your senators and representatives. Send it your local TV news. Post it on YouTube. Imagine hundreds of thousands of providers introducing themselves and talking about their patients. It would be powerful.
