The health reform law will postpone the projected bankruptcy of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund by 12 years, according to the latest annual report from the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees. The fund, which is where Medicare hospital payments come from, was expected to become insolvent by 2017, according to last year's Trustees' Report. Now that red-letter date will be in 2029.

Remember: The Trustees' Report doesn't issue insolvency dates for the Medicare Supplementary Insurance (SMI) program -- which is the source of Part B payments -- because the SMI is expected to be funded into the "indefinite future." This is because current law automatically provides financing for the SMI (read more) ...

The AMA and 33 other specialty societies want CMS to bring consultation billing back.

The results of an AMA survey (pdf) show the consult change at the beginning of the year had a negative impact on physician balance sheets during the first few months of the year. About 72% of physician respondents reported revenues declined by more than 5%.

This is significant because CMS predicted after the consult change specialties would not experience decreases of more than 3%, the AMA says. But the survey says 12% saw decreases in revenue of more than 20% and 18% have had revenue declines of 15% to 20%.

This has caused some practices to reduce the number Medicare patients they treat (20%) and eliminate staff (34%).

Read more on consults

The health reform law will save taxpayers nearly $8 billion over the next two years, according to the results of a CMS study released Aug. 2. These savings will increase exponentially to more than $575 billion over the next decade, according to the study.

TIP: You can download a copy of the 11-page "Implementing Medicare Cost Savings" study results from HHS for the precise details.

"In addition to bringing some much-needed fairness to our health insurance markets, the new law also makes a wide range of improvements to Medicare that will cut waste and fraud and shift resources towards high-quality care," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "[The] report shows how big -- and how fast -- an impact these reforms will have."

In a press release touting the study's rosy projections, CMS cited a bevy of factors, consisting mostly of the usual suspects, as being key to producing the savings (read more) ...

Medicare carriers are providing a two-step instruction for what to do when you receive an errant or misdirected remittance advice for a patient who is not your patient.

First, destroy the remittance advice. Second, let the carrier or Medicare Administrative Contractor know it has sent a remittance advice to the wrong address.

The carrier First Coast notes health care providers are subject to the privacy and security requirements under HIPAA. "You must safeguard patients' personally identifiable health information," and this applies even when the patient is someone else's patient.

Do most practices bill more level 3 E/M codes than level 4 and level 5 codes? How about the lower-level codes? You got your first look at how some of your peers stack up in this issue's Benchmark of the Week feature, which compared the ratio of low-level E/M codes to level 3 codes billed and the ratio of high-level codes to level 3 codes billed.

Now you can check out the ratios of every single state and territory in the U.S. with our complete table, titled "E/M visit levels by state or territory, 2008." It's a free document (read more) ...