LEGISLATION: Congress Won't Have Time To Fix Physician Payment Mess
Why another year of better pay could signal bad news for the long haulTo avoid a looming 5 percent cut to physicians' payments, Congress will have to pass another temporary increase this year. But if Congress keeps passing short-term fixes every year instead of repairing the broken Sustainable Growth Rate system, it creates its own problems, a Senate Republican aide admits. Problems include uncertainty for doctors, but also uncertainty for government actuaries (who found in 2004, for example, that the previous year's one-time doctor-pay fix forced them to raise beneficiaries' Part B premiums by an unprecedented amount). So it...
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