The Senate approved $82 billion to avoid draconian cuts to your Medicare payments for the next five years, but Congress still needs to pass legislation to nullify a 21% cut scheduled for March 1. Time is running out for Congress to act. Federal lawmakers are scheduled to go on break the week of Feb. 15, leaving just a handful of legislative days to pass a Medicare pay fix before March 1.

Stricter audit standards and a new way to measure errors led to a big increase in the number of mistakes made by you and your peers uncovered on audit, according to CMS's latest error rate findings. The Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) error rate dramatically increased to 7.8% in 2009, CMS says in its latest Comprehensive Error Rate Test (CERT) report.

It won't be the end of the world or the end of your shot to get $44,000 of government incentive money if you can't demonstrate meaningful use with an electronic health records (EHR) system by the end of 2011. You can still demonstrate meaningful use for any 90 days in 2012 and collect up to $18,000 of bonus money, the most possible in the first reporting year. This leaves Oct. 1, 2012 as the drop-dead deadline for a chance to get the entire $44,000 - a year longer than previously reported.

You've received initial guidance from CMS on how to bill E/M codes now that Medicare will not pay for consultation codes (99241-99245, 99251-99255), but you'll soon get more direction on the confusing transition, an official with a Medicare Administrative Contractor (MAC) says. Your peers are showing confusion and frustration with the consult change now that it's been a month of billing under the new policy.

Patients are experiencing sticker shock when confronted with paying the new Medicare deductible, several of your peers tell Part B News. CMS raised the deductible to $155 this year, a 14.8% increase from $135 in 2009 (PBN 1/4/10). Thirty-five percent of your peers say more patients have had trouble paying the deductible this year compared to last year, according to an unscientific Part B News survey.

You're seeing sharp cuts to common cardiology services this year (PBN 11/16/09) thanks to several new rules in the final fee schedule, and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) decided to stem the damage by suing HHS over a CMS decision to use a new dataset to determine Medicare payments. But the lawsuit has been tossed out on a technicality, Part B News has learned. 

Bank on Congress acting to stop Medicare payments from falling by 21.3% on March 1, but whether that action will come in the form of a temporary payment "patch" or a permanent "fix" remains a guessing game, experts tell Part B News.

You and your peers are letting cash drain from your pockets by incorrectly billing prolonged services, which were denied between 20% and 33% of the time in 2008, according to a Part B News analysis of the latest CMS claims data. Practices are billing prolonged services more often, and carriers believe they're getting it wrong more often, with denial rates rising from 2006 to 2008, the data shows.

With less than 22 days until the 21.3% cut to your Medicare payments is set to take effect, stakeholder groups led by the AMA mounted a high-profile campaign to permanently resolve the problem. Experts earlier predicted that 2010 would be the year for a permanent "fix" to the sustainable growth rate formula (SGR, PBN 1/4/10) that's responsible for setting the cuts.

Part B News adaptation of "Threshold time for prolonged visit codes 99354 and/or 99355 billed with office/outpatient codes" from CMS Transmittal 1875 to the Medicare Claims Processing Manual.