Much ado about nothing in proposed Medicare cuts
By John Whittlesey
On Monday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed to cut Medicare payments to acute-care hospitals for inpatient services by 0.1 percent year-over-year, or $142 million in fiscal 2011. This has created a bit of a groundswell, according to an article published Monday in Modern Healthcare.
However, 1 percent isn’t enough of a cut to spur administrators into action. And, so often, these cuts get delayed or reversed from the budget proposal. It’s often a shell game. The bigger issue is what will happen with the scheduled 21 percent decrease in Medicare MD payments in the next three months.
Will Congress allow the decrease to go through as projected in the health insurance bill, or will it renege? That would blow the projected cost savings over the next 10 years out of the water and give critics legitimate fodder to say that the bill didn’t work.
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John Whittlesey is a principal at HMC.
