Timeline of recent Medicare IPPS changes

The Bill that President Bush signed into law on Sept. 29 to reduce first-year base-rate cuts has resulted in CMS issuing another correction to IPPS Final Rule. Confused? Here’s a timeline of events to help explain:

• Sept. 26, 2007 – The Senate unanimously voted to pass a bill that would reduce Medicare’ base rate cuts by half in fiscal years 2008 and 2009. (Read blog post about this here. )
• Sept. 28, 2007 – Unrelated to the Senate vote, CMS issues corrections to its IPPS Final Rule to address errors in rates that affect other calculations. A display copy of these changes appeared on the CMS Web site, and the final version of the corrections are scheduled to be published in the Federal Register Oct. 10.
• Sept. 29, 2007 – President Bush signed the Senate bill, HB 3668, into law. Officially, the bill, now law, is called the "Transitional Medical Assistance (TMA), Abstinence Education, and QI Programs Extension Act of 2007."
• Oct. 1, 2007 – CMS IPPS Final Rule takes effect.
• Oct. 10, 2007 – CMS corrections to its IPPS Final Rule are published in the Federal Register. Within this correction notice, CMS announces that the Final Rule will need be amended to accommodate the base rate cuts that were signed into law by President Bush.

Within the CMS corrections published in the Federal Register, CMS stated the following:

Medicare claims processing systems have incorporated the software updates to accommodate both the September 28, 2007 Correction Notice and the "TMA, Abstinence Education, and QI Programs Extension Act of 2007," thus ensuring that claims with discharge dates of October 1, 2007 or later are processed with the correct rates. However, in order to provide sufficient time to fully test Medicare claims processing systems before claims under the IPPS are processed, those claims received by Medicare during the first few days of October may have a slight delay in payment by only a few days. The extra couple of days will ensure accurate claims processing and obviate the need for reprocessing hospital claims.