government
CMS plans to reprocess millions of 2010 Medicare claims
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Feb. 28, 2011
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has announced that it will begin automatically reprocessing millions of Medicare claims for services paid during the first few months of 2010. The action will result in about $200 million in additional payments to physicians.
The national health system reform statute signed into law in March 2010 included several retroactive changes to the 2010 Medicare physician fee schedule that sets payment rates for doctors under Part B. This required CMS to reprocess claims paid under an older version of the fee schedule between Jan. 1 and April 1, 2010.
The reprocessing effort involves millions of claims and will be a huge undertaking, CMS officials said. On Feb. 8, the agency said the effort would begin over the next several weeks. Physicians will not need to resubmit the claims to receive the additional payments they are owed.
The CMS announcement was in response to an American Medical Association inquiry about the status of the reprocessing effort. In a Dec. 10, 2010, letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the AMA urged the administration to provide information about how it planned to pay physicians.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/02/28/gvbf0228.htm.
