Doctors vote to fight Medicare imaging cuts and audit project

AMA delegates argue that physicians should stand together against attempts to limit Medicare funding to individual groups of physicians.

By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. July 3, 2006.

Chicago -- In a show of solidarity, physician delegates from the American Medical Association last month voted to actively oppose two elements of the Medicare system that so far have unfairly impacted only a minority of doctors.

The AMA will work with Congress to rescind Medicare's recovery audit contractor program, under which private firms comb through physician claims data to find instances in which the federal government overpaid doctors and to recoup those dollars. In a separate action at the Annual Meeting, the House of Delegates also decided to support the repeal or delay of medical imaging cuts that are due to start in January 2007.

The audit program is currently operating in three states over the course of a three-year pilot test that began in 2005. The Medicare imaging cuts will affect only physicians who offer such services in their offices and whose reimbursement for the technical portion of the scans currently exceeds what hospital outpatient departments receive for the same services.

But affected physicians argued in both cases that all doctors should be worried about where such relatively small steps could lead.

"This year, [lawmakers] may make further arbitrary cuts on any other method of care that they want," said John Seibel, MD, a delegate from the American Assn. of Clinical Endocrinologists, who spoke out against the imaging cuts. "This is not just affecting imaging. It may affect your services."

Troy Tippett, MD, a neurological surgeon and delegate from Florida, had a similar warning for the physician community as a whole about the recovery audits, which are operating in his state, New York and California.