(DIAGNOSTIC IMAGING) -- It’s a kind of man bites dog story: unusual, remarkable, yet oddly plausible. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has told its contractors to hold claims containing services paid under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule for the first 10 business days of March.
On reading this, the cynics among us might think it’s a ploy to buy time for an agency under financial duress, an accounting trick to slow an already lumbering machine so as to eke out a few days of interest by delaying payment. On the contrary, the agency that writes Medicare and Medicaid checks is doing this to help physicians.
Congress won’t be back in session until March 2, a day too late to keep the scheduled 21.2% cut in Medicare payments from going into effect. Legislators should have dealt with this months ago, but they were apparently too busy trying to make healthcare more efficient. Consequently, this political time bomb, looming for months, has ticked to zero. All that’s stopping a deeply flawed sustainable growth rate formula, with its 21.2% across-the-board cuts, from taking effect is a bureaucratic finger jammed in the detonator.
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