The government is broke and the people can’t afford to pay more. Every spending cut is going to gore someone’s ox. It really doesn’t matter though, because once we roll off the fiscal cliff and hit bottom, all benefits will be cut.
There are new rules and regulations in healthcare that come out every fiscal year. I’ve worked in rehab management for over 20 years and we go through billing and coding changes every September CMS releases their new coding and diagnosis
guidelines and how billings can be coded etc. Every department in the hospital who charges patients has to go
through this process. Some years suck because of the changes, and others are not so bad.
And just a fun little fact, the reason that PT and ST are lumped together is that when they originally came out with the ruling for the caps (years ago),
that when CMS was typing up the ruling, they forgot the comma and would not make a correction to separate the two
disciplines.
There is a lot we can hang on Obama’s head, but this is not one of them