Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

No phase-in could hit physical therapists hard.

If you've worried over the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) Five-Year Review of Work Relative Value Units under the Physician Fee Schedule, you're not alone.

Your professional associations have released comments on CMS' proposed rule and are crossing their fingers that Congress will take some action before the year's end.

In particular, the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) has expressed concern about the severity of CMS' projected payment cuts for 2007, according to PT Bulletin Online.

Without a phase-in, a proposed budget-neutrality adjustment in work values, combined with a negative annual payment update in the Physician Fee Schedule, would result in cuts of nearly 10 percent for physical therapists and many other health care professionals in 2007, APTA says.

Because CMS proposes to phase in calculation changes of practice expenses, APTA recommended that the changes in work values from the most recent five-year review of work values be similarly phased in over a multi-year period and be based on the fee schedule conversion factor, rather than distorting the work values of physical therapists' services.