News in brief - Sept. 18, 2006

Letter tells beneficiaries how to handle accidental Medicare premium checks - Medicare chief to leave post

Letter tells beneficiaries how to handle accidental Medicare premium checks

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in early September sent letters to roughly 230,000 Medicare beneficiaries with instructions on how to return Part D premium refunds that the government erroneously gave them.

Seniors who received one of these refund checks and have not cashed it can void the document and send it to a special P.O. box that is specified in the letter.

Beneficiaries also can send a personal check for the overpayment amount or call Medicare toll-free at 866-292-8080 to set up a direct debit from a personal bank account.

In response to concerns from lawmakers that some seniors already might have spent the money without realizing that the checks were sent in error, CMS also set up a fourth option for repayment over time.

Affected beneficiaries may call the toll-free number to set up an installment payment schedule over as many as seven months. An agency fact sheet can be found online (www.cms.hhs.gov/partnerships/downloads/premiumwithholdrefundissue.pdf).

Medicare chief to leave post

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, will depart the agency by early October, he announced on Sept. 5.

The move will allow him to spend more time with his family, he wrote in an e-mail to his staff.

Dr. McClellan, who replaced Tom Scully as CMS chief in March 2004, was previously the commissioner of the Food & Drug Administration. He also served as an economic adviser to the Bush administration and worked on health policy in the Treasury Dept. under President Clinton.

Dr. McClellan, an internist, did not immediately specify where he would go. But in the e-mail, he noted that he had been on leave from his professorships in economics at Stanford University and medicine at Stanford Medical School.

Dr. McClellan has been one of the authors of numerous studies investigating health care quality and health outcomes.