What is Happening with the 2024 Medicare Fee Schedule

Get updates on the 2024 Medicare Fee Schedule and its billing implications. Stick to the current fee schedule to avoid administrative hassles and ensure proper reimbursement, regardless of potential changes in March.

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Medicare Article with Fee Schedule

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Transcript:

We’ve received a number of phone calls, and many of you are wondering what’s happening with a Medicare Fee Schedule related to 2024. And the answer is a little more complicated than a simple answer. First of all, here’s what I would tell you. The information that we published at the end of December still holds true today, when Congress met in January, ultimately, they passed a continuing resolution, they just stalled to deal with some of the major issues until March. And so we’re in this provisional timeframe of January and February where the current Medicare Fee Schedule holds. The problem is when they deal with this again, and when they take it back up, if they come up with some level of solution in March, what we believe and based on what we are hearing in the healthcare industry as a whole is that ultimately, any changes they make later are not going to be made retroactive, incredibly expensive administratively for both the federal government and processing and reprocessing all of those claims, as well as with the provider groups and hospital systems and even your practice, and reapplying all of the payments if they were to to to make adjustments at this phase.

So what we are now telling all of our members is this, go ahead and utilize the current 2024 fee schedule, I’m going to make sure that you get the one that we published and include a link down below. Because the original one that released in November, some adjustments were made, I believe, around just before Christmas, the 21st 22nd 23rd timeframe of December, some small adjustments were made to several of the regions here in Illinois. So I’ll include a link down below to the current 2024 Medicare Fee Schedule. I encourage you to go ahead and begin to bill appropriately, you know, depending on your participation, status, whatever it may be. Now, if you were a participating provider with Medicare, we always strongly recommend that you continue to bill your normal office fees and don’t build just the Medicare fee. So Bill, your normal office fees, Medicare will reimburse, and you’ll only collect based on that limiting charge, and you’ll write it down like you do all of your other insurance carriers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, or UnitedHealthcare. You bill your standard office fee. And the advantage to that would be if changes take place in March, then you’re going to continue the same practice, you’ll just write down a different amount. But you’ll be assured to be able to receive the appropriate level of reimbursement when that fee schedule is shaken out if it’s changed in March.

So for today, just know that the Medicare fee schedule that we published at the end of December still holds true and still will be in effect. We don’t know if Congress is going to take up this issue. Although it seems to have some momentum to make some level of an adjustment it won’t be to recover the full 3.37%. We don’t believe it’s not going to be a long-term fix which is what we really hoped for was a really long-term fix where this problem doesn’t continue to take effect over the course of the next several years. Instead looks like it’s going to be another short-term fix and we’re going to be up discussing this issue again and again and again in the years to come. But hopefully, this helps you out for now and you know exactly how to handle your Medicare billings. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll catch you next week.