Despite the best efforts, lobbying and protests of every major physician association (including the American Chiropractors Association and the International Chiropractors Association), the 21% Medicare fee cuts are still scheduled for April 1, 2010.
For those of you who hope to lessen the blow of this bad news by taking comfort in the fact that a relatively small portion of your practice consists of Medicare patients – think again. This fee cut (which by the way, is scheduled to be a nice, round 20% reduction for Chiropractic fees) will impact all of your third party reimbursements in time!
This is due to the simple fact that most third party payers use the Medicare fee schedule as a basis to calculate their own reimbursement decisions. Read the fine print in your contracts and you will find that ABC Insurance pays 150% of the Medicare allowable or XYZ Insurance’s fee schedule is set at 175% of Medicare.
So, yes, at this point, there is no good news to report about this Medicare situation, which will go into effect April 1 or as soon as the carriers can get to the business of revising their reimbursement calculators to ensure that the screws on our Medicare torture chamber are nice and tight.
If you can find your state representatives and senators (you may have to watch some MTV programming or track them down in some tropical paradise, as it is spring break for most), be sure to let them know how disappointed you were in their inability to block this legislation and take 20% out of your already dismal Medicare paychecks.
In the meantime, my other recommendation is to consider this slap in the face a brutal wake up call that it is high time for you to start improving your practice. Take a look under the hood and see what needs tuning up. Then, promptly get to work on tweaking for additional performance.
If you need some guidance in the area of what’s going wrong, what to fix or where you stand, fill out my free, no obligation Practice Analysis Questionnaire and I will take a look with you.
Unless we get some sort of last minute reprieve, making no changes in your practice whatsoever will likely result in a 20% loss of your income in the near future if these Medicare fee cuts reach their full impact. I don’t know about you, but I am not willing to let anyone – whether it is the government, Goliath or any goon bigger than I am – take 20% of my income without a fight and some definite activity on my end to make up for the difference.
Contact your political reps. Start formulating Plan B. And let’s get to work on making lemonade out of lemons!
In the meantime, keep these words of Alistair Cooke in mind:
“In the best of times, our days are numbered. And so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were assigned in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball and bounce a baby.”
To Your Success!
Tom Necela, DC
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