Medicare Pay Cuts Extension Through December 1st 2010

HR 4213 finally bombed out of the Senate late Thursday (6/24) after a couple of attempts to dump chunks of the overstuffed bill failed to get the significant passing votes to pass (57-41 yea, but they needed 60 Senate votes to pass).  There will be many jobless Americans wondering what will happen to them now (although a stripped down version with just the jobless extensions has been relabeled for just itself and it back on the docket.  No significant action seems to be expected on it until the House and the Senate both return from the 4th of July holiday.)  It failed to pass the additional Medicaid aide for states, dumped Cobra help extensions, etc.  Not only was the cost of this jumbo bill very high, but it was promoting a significant tax increase.  So, it being busted is not necessarily a bad thing, now maybe they will weigh each portion separately for cost and merit as should have been done from the beginning.

What does this mean for Doctors and your Medicare cut? 

Well, to President Obama's credit, he had the Medicare pay cut portion stripped out of the bill last week, on Thursday (6/24) a separate measure for just the Medicare pay cut extension was passed through and signed by the President.  It has been really difficult this morning to get through on www.opencongress.com to get the specifics.  But I was able to find a couple of articles on line to corroborate this.  The new extension law, not only postpones the pay cut until December 1st 2010, but it also grants doctors a 2.2% raise retroactive back to June 1.  Again, allowing the government some time for the pay cut structure to be revisited and hopefully re-done.  I would also believe that you would be receiving some additional notices and information from Medicare directly about this soon, so keep your eyes posted for them. Per the MedPage Today web site, Washington Week section article “Washington Week: Obama Signs Medicare Pay Fix” CMS says that claims already submitted for June, that were lower than the new 2.2% rate, will have to contact their Medicare contractor to request an adjustment.  Consequently, if your payments were above the new rate, those will be adjusted down.

A couple of additional articles for you, if you would like more information:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_congress_spending
http://mhs.typepad.com/threepointfive-45/2010/06/hr-4213-tax-extenders-bill-not-survive-cloture-vote-put-aside.html