Home Health & Hospice Week

Congress finally passed a so-called "doc fix" bill, a week after Medicare contractors started processing your referring and employed physicians' claims with the 21 percent cut that took effect June 1. But you can expect to see the same rigamarole in six months.

On June 25, President Obama signed into law the "Preservation of Access to Care for Medicare Beneficiaries and Pension Relief Act of 2010," CMS notes in a release. "This law establishes a 2.2 percent update to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) payment rates retroactive from June 1 through November 30, 2010." Contractors will reprocess claims paid at the lower rate "as soon as possible," CMS says.

Physician practices still worry about having to check up on those claims to ensure that they were reprocessed correctly, they say. In addition, they'll have to keep an eye on any secondary insurers' payments to ensure that adjustments are accurate across the board.

Docs are not pleased with the temporary solution. "Continued short-term actions are creating severe instability that harms seniors as physicians make decisions to protect their practices from Medicare's volatility," says American Medical Association President Cecil B. Wilson in a statement. "Continuing down this path just slaps a Band-Aid on a problem that needs urgent surgery," Wilson said.