I bet you weren't expecting Santa to bring you this:
Your Medicare payments are safe from the 27.4% sustainable growth rate (SGR) cut, but not for long. After nearly a weeklong stalemate, Congress passed a bill Dec. 22 to keep the SGR cut at bay, extend payroll tax breaks and unemployment benefits through February.
This means you and your peers will see a 0% update on your Medicare payments until March 1 unless Congress votes to extend the “doc fix.” The two-month stay passed through Congress largely with the hope legislators reconvene after the holiday recess and draft a one-year fix to physician payments by March 1. The $33 billion temporary fix, signed into law by President Barack Obama Dec. 23, will have a conversion factor of $34.0376 until Feb. 29.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a two-year version of this bill early last month with the Senate passing a two-month rendition Dec. 18 (PBN 12/5/11).
“With this brief reprieve from the massive 27 percent cut to Medicare payments, Congress now has to enact a real and fiscally responsible solution to this sorry cycle of scheduled cuts and short-term patches that compromises access to care for patients and drives up costs for taxpayers,” said AMA president Peter Carmel, M.D., in a news release.