Reuters
Photo: President Bush listens to a question
from the audience
as he speaks about the Medicare
Bush
administration delaying Medicare fee cut
By JIM ABRAMS,
Associated Press Writer
Mon Jun 30, 7:56 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- The Bush
administration said Monday it will delay paying
doctors for treating Medicare patients in early
July to give Congress more time to block a
scheduled 10.6 percent fee cut.
The move by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services doesn't block the cut, scheduled to take
place Tuesday. It's up to Congress to decide
that.
But to give Congress more time to act, the agency
will instruct its contractors to delay the
processing of any physician or non-physician
Medicare claims for health care services given
during the first 10 business days of July. Claims
for services received on before June 30 will be
processed as usual.
CMS will not be making any payments at the 10.6
percent reduced rate until July 15, at the
earliest, agency spokesman Jeff Nelligan said.
The delay in processing claims probably means
that claims that would have been paid in mid-July
will be delayed up to a week, the agency
estimates.
Another option would have been to issue on-time
payments at the lower rate and pay the rest later
after Congress fixes the problem.
Congress, facing the prospect of millions of
angry seniors at the polls in November, will be
under tremendous pressure to act quickly when it
returns to Washington the week of July 7 to
prevent the cuts in payments for some 600,000
doctors who treat Medicare patients. The cuts
were scheduled because of a formula that requires
fee cuts when spending exceeds established goals.
But Senate Republicans and the White House are in
a standoff with Democrats seeking to cut
subsidies to insurance companies that provide
Medicare coverage to "pay for" easing
the payment cuts to doctors. There's no guarantee
the standoff will be broken soon.
Lawmakers on all sides promise that if the
impasse goes on and doctors receive the lower
payments, they'll get repaid retroactively
through automatically reprocessed claims. That's
more difficult than it sounds, given the millions
of Medicare claims that have to be processed
every day. A comparable situation that occurred
in early 2006 took six months to fully fix.
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt had promised Friday
that his agency "will take all steps
available to the department under the law to
minimize the impact on providers and
beneficiaries." On Monday, the department
used its administrative tools to delay
implementing the scheduled 10.6 percent cuts.
Democrats on Capitol Hill say that the
administration is following existing anti-fraud
rules that require a two-week delay before most
Medicare payments to doctors can be paid anyway.
Republicans say the real issue is processing of
claims, not the payment of them.
Almost every year, Congress finds a way to block
the automatic Medicare cuts. But last week the
Senate fell just one vote short of the 60 needed
to proceed to legislation that would have stopped
the cut.
In a particularly vitriolic exchange, Democrats
and Republicans blamed each other for what Dr.
Nancy H. Nielsen, president of the American
Medical Association, said has put the country
"at the brink of a Medicare meltdown."
"Seniors need continued access to the
doctors they trust. It's urgent that Congress
make that happen," the AMA said in ads taken
out in Capitol Hill newspapers read by members of
Congress and their aides.
Doctors have complained for years that Medicare
payments have failed to cover rising costs.
This year, majority Democrats homed in on cutting
the Medicare Advantage program, which is an
ideological issue for both parties. The Bush
administration and Republicans like Medicare
Advantage because it lets the elderly and
disabled choose to get their health benefits
through private insurers rather than through
traditional Medicare. Democrats argued that
government payments to the insurers are too
generous.
The White House warned that President Bush would
be urged to veto a bill that contained cuts to
Medicare Advantage.
That didn't stop the House last Tuesday from
approving the legislation 355-59, well above the
margin needed to override a veto. Every Democrat
supported it, and Republicans, bucking their
president, voted 129-59 for it.
__
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Andrew
Taylor contributed to this report.
___
The bill is H.R. 6331.
___
Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov
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