CONGRESS RETURNS TO WASHINGTON MONDAY AND NEEDS TO ADDRESS SGR CUT

Congress will return to Washington this Monday, June 7, 2010, and will attempt to retroactively prevent the 21% Medicare physician cut that technically went into effect on June 1. Prior to the Memorial Day recess, the United States House of Representatives passed legislation to again prevent the 21% cut, provide a 2.2% increase for the rest of this year, and an additional 1% increase for 2011, but then a reversion to SGR in 2012. It is not clear at this moment whether there will sufficient votes in the Senate to enact this legislation, or whether another alternative SGR fix proposal will need to be advanced.

In response to the outrage in the physician community that failure to address this problem has caused, the American Medical Association launched this past week a major radio, TV, and newspaper ad campaign that urged the Senate to once and for all fix the Medicare SGR problem. According to AMA, TV and radio ads ran in Arizona, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, South Dakota and Virginia. Print ads were run in national papers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, as well as regional papers in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Virginia, states with possible key swing votes.

To temporarily prevent implementation of the 21% cut, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has issued instructions to its contractors to postpone processing claims for Medicare physician services provided on or after June 1 for 10 days to provide time for Congress to complete its action and overturn the scheduled cut retroactive to June 1.  All physicians are urged to contact their respective member of Congress as well as Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, to express disappointment in Congress’ failure to address this problem, and the threat to access to care in their communities if this problem is not solved. Your action is essential to remind our legislators just how severe this problem is! Physicians can call using the AMA’s Grassroots Hotline at 1-800-833-6354.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 10:02 am and is filed under MEDICARE UPDATES, NATIONAL HEALTHCARE NEWS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.