Local News
Medicare cuts still without a solution
Despite a last minute attempt to prevent a 21.2 percent cut in Medicare physician payments, the U.S. Senate ended the week without a solution.
However, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have announced that they will hold reimbursement claims for 10 business days to allow Congress to come up with a solution.
Jordan Stoick, communications director for U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said a similar situation happened in 2008, when CMS held claims for 10 days until Congress passed a retroactive fix to the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). SGR is the formula lawmakers use to determine Medicare payments.
“The Senate is expected to consider the issue next week,” Stoick said in a Saturday e-mail to the Laurel Leader-Call. “It is almost a certainty that any fix would be retroactive, meaning cuts to doctors’ reimbursement rates would not be implemented even if the legislation is passed after the March 1 deadline.
“Sen. Wicker continues to support a permanent fix to this problem, and has introduced legislation to do just that,” Stoick added. “He has voted to stop the cuts over half a dozen times in the past. The few times he was forced to vote against long-term fix legislation, it was tied to Medicare cuts or deficit increases of over $200 million.”
The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation — H.R. 4961, the Temporary Extension Act — that would have postponed the cuts for an additional 30 days past March 1 with the hope of a more permanent fix to the SGR formula.
However, when that bill moved to the Senate, it failed by “unanimous consent” vote when Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) objected.
While the bill would have postponed Medicare cuts, a number of other programs including unemployment benefits, COBRA, the highway bill and small business guarantees were also included.
The failure of the legislation provoked a press release from U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis, who said she was “disappointed that partisan politics have been interjected into this essential extension.”
“It is essential that Congress extend the unemployment insurance and COBRA safety net programs that are party of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act past their current expiration date of Feb. 28,” she said. “If Emergency Unemployment Compensation and full federal funding of the Extended Benefit program are not extended, 400,000 Americans will lose their vital benefits during the first couple of weeks in March. By May, nearly 3 million people would be left without these benefits.”
- Local News
-
-
Not content with No. 1
West Jones High School is not resting on its laurels of being one of the first schools in the Jones County School District to receive a “High Performance” rating.
-
Wicker tours Sunbeam plant
- Travel again an issue for city council
-
MDOT garners national award for S-Curve project
-
Hampton makes Laurel campaign stop
-
Local newborn makes history
A Heidelberg newborn recently received the first arterial switch ever performed in the state.
-
Supporters say library vital
- Wicker visiting area today
-
Dixie Electric learned from Hurricane Katrina
-
JCJC students get hands-on lesson in herbicides
- More Local News Headlines
-
