Important: Your Medicare Payments

Beginning today, you may start to see Medicare checks in your mailbox.  These will be payments that Medicare had been holding off on processing, hoping that Washington D.C. would pass the next reprieve for the Medicare pay cut.  The month-to-month wait was finally going into a 19 month reprieve, but the resolution to do it, H.R.4213, is currently stalled in debate on the Senate floor.  Again, the problem isn't giving you doctors a break on the pay cut, the problem is that your pay cut is tied in with an extension on jobless benefits, Medicaid, and a bunch of other stuff.  Stuff that would best be served on individual bills, rather than as one mega-conglomerate bill.

What does this mean to you? 

As of June 17th, Medicare began to process the claims they'd been holding since June 1st.  So you may begin to get payments this week.  Which is good (especially if you were unaware of the hold).  HOWEVER, you may find that your payments have been diminished. 

Because the payment reprieve still has yet to be passed, and the date has passed for the pay cut to be in action, you will probably be seeing that the pay cut IS in effect on this check (and into the future), until or unless H.R. 4213 passes.  There has been no word about retro-paybacks when it does pass, but it is possible that you may recoup the losses in the future, once everything has all been sorted out.

• For current information on the bill, you can visit OpenCongress.org
• You can also get information from Medicare via their automated voice recordings at Medicare.
• You can also get additional information on Medicare's latest bulletin.