Special SDCMS "News You Can Use"
— June 25, 2010
Executive Director Comment: Lucy wins again …. Well, you guessed it, once again Lucy (Congress) yanks the football (GPCI fix) away from Charlie Brown (the Docs) at the last minute. Yesterday morning (Thursday) we thought we had GPCI in the bag with a compromise worked out in the Senate. Now physicians get another band-aid on a compound fracture, and San Diego’s physicians have to live with the gross inequity of being treated by Medicare reimbursement as a rural county.
Paraphrasing Thomas Paine in 1776, “These are indeed the times that try physicians' souls.”
If you have stories to tell about the impact of these serial trips to the precipice on your ability to care for your patients, please send them to me at Gehring@SDCMS.org [1]. We will tell your stories to our legislators.
Of note, the California delegations in both the House and the Senate were completely in support of a longer SGR fix and a five-year fix to GPCI. This was not a failure to advocate effectively by California's legislators or California's organized medicine.
Paraphrasing the Governator, “We’ll be back ….”
Congress Passes Legislation Blocking Medicare Cuts Through November 2010
- Today (June 25, 2010), President Obama signed into law the “Preservation of Access to Care for Medicare Beneficiaries and Pension Relief Act of 2010.” This law establishes a 2.2% update to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) payment rates retroactive from June 1 through November 30, 2010.
- This was stand-alone legislation because the Senate could not achieve the 60 votes necessary to achieve cloture (blocking a filibuster) to pass more comprehensive House legislation, which would have stopped Medicare cuts for 19 months, extend extra federal Medicaid matching (FMAP) funds to cash-strapped states, extend unemployment insurance, restore some tax breaks, and raise taxes on managers of buyout funds and other investment partnerships, and finally fix the California geographic payment (GPCI) inequity.
- The new Medicare rate applies only through November 2010. If Congress fails to intervene, Medicare cuts mandated by the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) will take effect on December 1, 2010.
- In December 2010, the Medicare physician payment cut will be 23%, increasing to nearly 30% in January 2011.
- The precise details of how CMS will retroactively adjust payments made while the 21% cut was in effect will be promulgated as soon as they are known.