CMS Proposed 2010 Payment for Procedures
While the previous table tries to demonstrate stability in fees, this table shows that charges for the same procedure and care delivery net a 10-30% decrease in charges for 2010.
The issue goes back to a law passed in the 1990s that was supposed to ensure that the amount Medicare paid doctors for each beneficiary grew no faster than the overall economy. That didn’t happen. (The law created something known as the “sustainable growth rate,” or SGR, in Washington jargon).
So now there are two different worlds. There’s the official world, in which doctors are scheduled to get a 21.5% pay cut from Medicare next year under SGR. And then there’s the real world, where Congress will intervene at the last minute to block the pay cut, as it’s done time and again in recent years.
There have been calls for Congress to fix the situation, but doing so would wreak budgetary havoc: It would require admitting that payments to physicians are way higher than the government officially expected.
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