Last Friday, Congress voted to prevent a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments for physicians for 2012. The Kaiser Health Network’s Jackie Judd interviewed colleague Mary Agnes Carey about the agreement. An excerpt:
JACKIE JUDD: Good Day, this is Health on the Hill. I’m Jackie Judd. Breaking news from Capitol Hill where Senate and House negotiators have reached agreement on the “doc fix,” so that physicians treating Medicare patients will not have payments slashed by 27 percent later this month. Covering the story is Mary Agnes Carey of Kaiser Health News. Mary Agnes, what are the details?
MARY AGNES CAREY: As you mentioned, the big news here is that the physicians will not see a payment cut starting March 1st. They were scheduled to get a 27 percent payment cut. That payment cut will not happen for the rest of the year. But they also did not get a payment increase, which is what the House-passed bill would have done. Many physicians who take Medicare patients would have liked to have seen that.
They also made some changes in a package of things called Medicare extenders – policy provisions. But concerning health care, this is certainly the biggest news of the day.
JACKIE JUDD: And what does it cost to restore those payments, or to maintain them at the current level?
MARY AGNES CAREY: About $20 billion for a 10-month fix, which has been the problem all along here, is how expensive these fixes can be whether they’re short-term or longer-term.
JACKIE JUDD: And where did they find the $20 billion?
MARY AGNES CAREY: Well, some of it actually comes from the health law. Five billion dollars comes from the health law’s prevention fund, and this would be over the next 10 years. $2.5 billion comes from additional Medicaid money for Louisiana that was contained in the health law. And there’s also an extension of a phasing-down of Medicaid payments to hospitals that take a lot of lower-income folks. Those reductions would be extended for another year.