Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Welcome to July. Are you ready for your 11% pay cut?
Well, not just yet. As you might know, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was set to cut physician payments by 10.6% starting July 1 unless Congress acted to stave off the cuts by changing Medicare's sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula.
As you might also know, Congress last week was unable to pass legislation that would have prevented the cuts before adjourning for an extended July 4 holiday.
But you might not know that the Department of Health and Human Services on Monday gave physicians a little breathing room by announcing that CMS would stop processing Medicare and Medicaid claims for 10 business days, giving Congress more time to fix the SGR impasse.
Read all about the situation and how it may affect your practice in an article by staff writer Kate Madden Yee, available by clicking here. And check back for updates as we continuing monitoring the story.
In the meantime, CMS has gone through with the release of its Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) for 2009, which includes a 5.4% payment reduction effective January 1, 2009. On the positive side, the new MPFS also takes a crack at in-office self-referral by requiring all physicians performing diagnostic testing in their offices to enroll with the government and meet the same standards as independent diagnostic testing facilities (IDTFs). Learn more by clicking here.
Ultrasound scammers sentenced
In other news in the community, a physician who was convicted of running a scam operation to bill Medicare for phony ultrasound scans has received 30 months in prison -- the latest sign that the feds are serious about cracking down on healthcare fraud.
The physician and four accomplices were convicted of setting up an ultrasound clinic and rounding up patients to receive ultrasound scans that weren't medically necessary or weren't performed at all. Patients were recruited with the promise of free transportation, food, and medical care, and workers at the "clinic" even posed as physicians and nurses.
Learn more about the case by clicking here, or visit the Imaging Center Digital Community at centers.auntminnie.com.
