Anesthesia Billing and Collections Doc groups: Shift money to scrap SGR
Author : Doc Clemens
Doc groups: Shift money to scrap SGR
Physician organizations are asking Congress to use money that had been projected to be spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for a permanent alternative to the sustainable growth-rate formula used to calculate Medicare payments to doctors.
Using excess baseline projections for Overseas Contingency Operations amounts to "cleaning the books" and will allow the elimination of a "flawed budget gimmick," physician organizations stated in a letter signed by 110 state medical associations and specialty societies. The roster of signees includes 47 societies representing 46 states and the District of Columbia. (The Alaska, Indiana, Louisiana and Utah state medical societies did not sign.)
Unless Congress takes action, doctors will have their Medicare payment cut by 27.4% on March 1 under the current SGR formula. According to the letter, if the SGR had been repealed in 2005, the resulting cost would have been $48 billion, but now that cost is $290 billion "and growing rapidly."
Last month, President Barack Obama signed a two-month SGR "patch" to avert the pay cut that had been scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1. House Republicans had sought a two-year patch. In the letter, the physician organizations noted that that would merely increase the cost of repealing the SGR to $346 billion and lead to a threatened 36% Medicare pay cut two years from now.
"Pushing off this problem continues this reckless pattern of spending billions of dollars only to make future cuts deeper and more expensive to solve,” the organizations note in the letter. "We agree that our nation faces significant fiscal challenges, and that Medicare is not immune. However, it is impossible to implement common-sense programmatic reforms while an immediate and constant threat of massive cuts hangs over the program."
In December 2010, the president signed legislation freezing Medicare payments for 12 months. Over the previous 12 months, Congress had passed six individual short-term SGR patches.
In a news release, the American Medical Association noted that members of Congress have received some 500,000 telephone calls and e-mails urging them "to stop spending taxpayer dollars to preserve a formula everyone agrees is broken" and find a better way to calculate payments for physicians who care for Medicare patients and military personnel and families covered by the Tricare healthcare program.
"There have been 13 short-term patches passed by Congress," said Dr. Peter Carmel, president of the AMA, in the release. "These patches increase both the long-term cost to taxpayers and the severity of scheduled cuts to physicians who care for Medicare and Tricare patients."