Pediatric Coding Alert

If you’ve seen the news over the past few weeks, you know that the government had to face across-the-board spending cuts effective March 1 due to Congress’s failure to agree on a way to avert the $85 billion budget reduction, referred to as “the sequester.” Although most of the discussions on this topic sound like legalese, the bottom line is that Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) payments are exempt from the sequestration cuts.

Effective April 1, assuming the government does not act in time to reverse the cuts, Medicare will face a two percent hit, but Medicaid and CHIP will remain unaffected by the cuts.