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Just you, a beach chair, and Medicare regs
Medicare dropped its own summer reading list last week — a tidy 3,200 pages of regulations that govern how doctors, surgery centers, and hospital outpatient departments will get paid next year.
The usual stuff happened: Medicare intends to increase hospital outpatient payments by $5.2 billion in 2025, but the hospital industry whined it’s not enough. Medicare also is decreasing the all-important conversion factor (which helps turn physician tasks and procedures into payments), and that’s because the law required the agency to do so. The predictable outcry from physician lobbyists initiated the standard demands for Congress to do something, although they again don’t expect lawmakers to do much, my colleague John Wilkerson reports in a new story this morning.
