The HHS Office of Inspector General estimates POS selection errors triggered more than $13.8 million in overpayments in 2007.

A group of Republican senators recently introduced the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act. The piece of legislation won't do away with HHS or CMS. The proposal would eliminate just one small group of bureaucrats - the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).

The IPAB was created in the health care reform law last spring, but won't officially come together until 2014. The IPAB will be a 15-member group tasked with creating non-binding proposals "to reduce excess cost growth and improve the quality of care for Medicare" patients. The board's Medicare recommendations would become law unless Congress steps in with their own proposal, but any substitute measure from Congress must have the same budgetary impact, says the law Washington law firm McDermott Will & Emery. The board will take actions when Medicare costs are projected to be unstable, but cannot ration care, raise taxes or premiums, eligibility or benefits, according to the law.

The GOP senators didn't vote for the reform bill and they don't like the idea of an IPAB. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in a statement, "In true fashion of Obama-Reid-Pelosi hubris, the IPAB is the definition of a government takeover. America's seniors deserve the ability to hold elected officials accountable for the decisions that affect their Medicare, but IPAB would take that away from seniors and put power in the hands of politically-appointed Washington bureaucrats. This bill to repeal IPAB is just one step towards starting over with real health care reform that empowers patients instead of beltway bureaucrats."

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%).

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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) ...