TAG:
Medicare
Palmetto GBA Tells Consultant to Take Down Test Price Data
CEO SUMMARY: Lawyers for Medicare contractor Palmetto GBA sent a cease and desist letter in September to a respected lab consultant, telling him to delete from his health policy blog a document containing Medicare genetic test price and coding data. In the letter, Quinn was directed…
Medicare COVID Test Coding May Become a ‘Logistical Nightmare’
STARTING JAN. 1, 2021, clinical laboratories performing COVID-19 tests using high-throughput systems for Medicare patients must comply with a complex new coding rule when submitting claims for these tests. The federal Centers for Med…
Community Lab Ceases after 37 Years of Operation
CEO SUMMARY: In Pennsylvania, one of the state’s largest independent clinical laboratories, HNL Lab Medicine in Allentown, acquired a lab competitor last month, Northeastern Laboratory Medicine in Hazelton. The deal is a good strategic move for both labs because HNL will continue to…
Lab Finances to Become More Challenging
When you finish reading our story about how Medicare spending for molecular and genetic tests jumped by as much as 700% in certain states during 2019, you’ll be among the first in the nation to understand why a financial crisis is soon to wash over those clinical laboratories and pathology grou…
Medicare Pays 500% More for Molecular Test Claims
CEO SUMMARY: Rapid growth in what Medicare spent for molecular tests in recent years may lead federal investigators to increase scrutiny of fraudulent billing for clinical laboratory and molecular pathology tests, according to a lab consultant who has tracked such spending in recent y…
Proposed Medicare 2021 PFS Cuts Pathology Fees by 9%
IF THE PROPOSED MEDICARE 2012 PHYSICIAN FEE SCHEDULE (PFS) RULE—published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Aug. 4—takes effect as currently written, pathology professional fees will be cut by 9%, effective Jan. 1, 2021. This was not…
Lab, Path Finances Crash; Next Test Wave: Serology
CEO SUMMARY: For clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups, the day-by-day impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is unfolding much like Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans in 2005. Every 24 hours, labs get unwelcome news, along with uncertainty about whether it will …
DOJ Says Georgia Man Got Kickbacks for COVID-19 Tests
JUST WEEKS AFTER THE FIRST CASES OF SARS-CoV-2 appeared in the United States, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges in a COVID-19 lab test fraud scheme. Erik Santos, 49, of Braselton, Ga., was charged with conspiracy to defraud federal and private healthcare programs by submitting fraudule…
Is Health Price Transparency at Its Tipping Point?
Is it a coincidence that a number of uninsured consumers filed separate lawsuits in federal courts against Laboratory Corporation of America and Quest Diagnostics—alleging, in both cases, that they were overcharged for clinical…
November 25 2019 intelligence late breaking lab news
Medicare lab test price cuts mandated by the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) are eroding the finances of urology groups that do in-office clinical laboratory testing. In the November issue of Urology Times, urologist Robert A. Dowling, MD, wrote a news story that identified the cut…
CURRENT ISSUE
Volume XXVII, Number 16 – November 16, 2020
UNWELCOME CHANGES to how labs do business are forcing labs to cope with high demand for COVID-19 testing while dealing with government and private payers interfering with normal operating procedures. Medicare has new requirements and payment rates for COVID-19 tests. Also reported here are UnitedHealthcare’s new Laboratory Test Registry Protocol, and California’s new COVID-19 testing laboratory that is diverting lab instruments, supplies, and test kits away from hospital and independent labs in the state.
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