|
Related sites |
Medicare spending dips slightly for first time ever
Posted
11-22-99 Washington. Medicare costs fell this year for the first time ever because of congressional budget cuts and a crackdown on fraud. New statistics from the Treasury Department show that Medicare expenditures dipped 1 percent to $212 billion in the 1999 fiscal year ending Sept. 30, from $213.6 billion the previous year. Medicare spending normally increases by about 10 percent a year as the program struggles to keep pace with the growing elderly population and rising healthcare costs. Most of the drop can be attributed to cuts in provider payments imposed by Congress in 1997, said Marilyn Moon, a health economist with the Urban Institute, a public trustee of the Medicare Trust Fund. But she said some signs also indicate providers are being more careful in their billing practices as a result of several criminal indictments of hospital officials accused of defrauding Medicare. "When you have highly publicized and visible prosecutions of people, other folks seem to change their behavior very rapidly," Moon said. Hospitals now appear to be less likely to seek higher Medicare payments based on misdiagnoses of patients, Moon said. The number of patients admitted to hospitals with "complicated pneumonia," for instance, declined by nearly 1 percent in 1999 after increasing by more than 2 percent annually for nearly a decade. Hospitals receive less Medicare money for treating patients suffering from "simple" pneumonia. "We feel many hospitals were using the complicated code more frequently than was justified, and that this was a billing phenomena and not a health phenomena," Moon said. Most experts expect the spending dip to be temporary because the elderly population is growing. And the drop may be offset entirely by Congress's decision early this month to restore $11 billion in Medicare payments after intense lobbying by healthcare groups that argued that the 1997 cuts went too far.
|