Effects of Budget Supercommittee Failure

By now most of us have heard about the failure of the Budget Supercommittee. The question hanging on all our minds is "How is that failure going to affect healthcare providers?"

Both the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have released public statements about the negative influence of the committee inaction.

Rich Umbdenstock, President and CEO of the AHA, stated that "sequestration means that arbitrary reductions in resources for patient care under Medicare will now be set to take effect under the law for the remainder of the decade." (italics added) 

An official statement by the AMA, had some harsh words concerning the inability of the committee to fix the problematic payment system. Dr. Peter Carmel, President of the AMA, said "Once again, Congress failed to stop the annual charade of scheduled Medicare physician payment cuts and short-term patches, which spends more taxpayer money to perpetuate a policy everyone agrees is fatally flawed."

Find-A-Code is concerned about the very real possibility of a 27% Medicare cut actually going into effect on January 1st. Even though the AHA statement reported that there is supposed to be a 2% cap on the cuts, it is unlikely that any laws will be passed BEFORE January 1st. This means that we may have to play the "hold claims until" game again this year.

We will keep a close eye on the situation and we strongly encourage everyone to contact their congressional leaders and push for separate, distinct healthcare legislation which will permanently FIX the fee problems we have faced every year for the last several years.

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