tci Part B Insider - 2005 Issue 5

Congress Won't Have Time To Fix Physician Payment Mess

To avoid a looming 5 percent cut to physicians' payments, Congress will have to pass another temporary increase this year. But Congress will create its own problems if it keeps passing short-term fixes every year instead of repairing the broken Sustainable Growth Rate system, 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 makes more sense for lawmakers to enact a new method of setting...

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