In Washington, the National Institutes of Health is special. But is it super special?
That is, will the research agency's unique bipartisan appeal inside the Beltway produce both an agreement to avoid looming cuts to the agency under a deficit-reduction law and show the way to broader deficit deal? At least one member of Congress who sits on an influential committee thinks it can.
Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Thursday that bipartisan efforts under way to avoid cuts to the relatively tiny NIH budget could “build the foundation” for an agreement replacing many of the $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts required by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Providers are among the multitude watching discussions to replace the so-called sequester, as it requires Medicare to cut $11.1 billion from their reimbursements next year.
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Later this week, the nation's hospitals and physicians will launch another round of ads in Washington-based publications to warn Congress of the disastrous results that will come from cuts to Medicare early next year. Meanwhile, an investigative study from the Center for Public Integrity shows one way hospitals and doctors are coping with the tough federal reimbursement environment: steadily billing higher rates for treating Medicare patients in the last 10 years.
Established in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit, investigative news organization. In its new study, the center found that from 2001 through 2010, thousands of providers chose more expensive billing codes over less costlier ones, even though “there's little hard evidence they spent more time with patients or that their patients were sicker and required more complicated—and time-consuming—care.”
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