CMS is going out of its way to start showing progress on quality improvement and financial savings, releasing early results from three demonstration programs. The demos, which focus on both physician and hospital groups, are several years old and ongoing, but CMS released partial data that provides "strong evidence that offering providers financial incentives for improving patient care increases quality of care, and can reduce the growth in Medicare expenditures," the agency said in a press release (read more about Medicare demos) ...

Will bipartisan agreement on the need for a permanent fix to the Medicare payment formula eventually lead to an actual bipartisan agreement? For years there has been bipartisan agreement that the current payment formula is flawed, but there has been no bipartisan solution to fix it.

Republicans and Democrats said they needed to work together on a permanent fix while debating the merits of the one-year doc fix bill Thursday morning. "We need to put aside partisan politics and in the upcoming year, sit down and come up with a new formula to fix permanently how we pay our physicians," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said.  Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) later agreed, saying "we need to work together to achieve a permanent fix in the next Congress."

Click here to read more on the doc fix

The Senate Finance Committee has posted the text of the 1-year Medicare payment fix bill and a three-page summary document. Here are the links:

• Text of HR 4994, the Medicare and Medicaid Extenders Act of 2010;
• the summary document; and
• the Congressional Budget Office score of the bill (showing it is paid for).

The bill has support from Democratic and Republican leadership in the Senate and could pass by the end or today (Wednesday). It would then go to the House and on to the White House for approval.

Who knows -- maybe this could be wrapped up by Friday and we won't have to worry about payment cuts until December 2011?

Several Washington news outlets and health care lobbyists report Senate Finance Committee aides reached a tentative deal Monday night to prevent the massive Medicare payment cut scheduled for Jan. 1. A proposed one-year pay fix delaying a 30% cut to reimbursement rates could be brought to the Senate floor as early as this week.

Politico's Jennifer Haberkorn writes that the $19 billion pay patch would be offset with tax subsidies established by the Affordable Care Act. The money was set aside for Americans to purchase  insurance plans after 2014. However, some Democrats might balk at the idea of using these funds as Democrats had fought to increase subsidies for  Americans purchasing plans in new health insurance exchanges.

The proposal may also extend other Medicare payment provisions, such as the therapy cap exemptions, that are set to expire on Dec. 31.

You've got the details of annual wellness visit in writing, thanks to a CMS transmittal released Dec. 3. There are few surprises in the 35-page document, which is effective Jan. 1, the same day you can first start billing Medicare for this service. Transmittal 2109 does offer a full list of the remittance advice codes you'll see in the unhappy scenario that your annual wellness visit (AWV) gets denied.

While we have written extensively about the major requirements that could cause an early, edit-based denial of the AWV, knowing exactly how the error codes will read may help expedite your appeal efforts. Here's a breakdown, with special attention on the new codes (read more about CMS wellness visit transmittal) ...