The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) recently joined forces with 18 other major medical and health care organizations and launched a grassroots and advertising campaign to ensure that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin implementation of up-to-date practice expense rates into Medicare physician payments, without unnecessary intervention by Congress.

The Practice Expense Equity Coalition supports the new practice expense rates recently issued by CMS, which use accurate data from a rigorous survey supported by more than 70 medical and health care professional groups and recognize that overhead costs differ among physician and health care specialties.

"Previously, CMS had been using practice cost data for most physicians and health care professionals that was at least a decade old and failed to capture the relative costs faced by different practices today," said Helene Fearon, PT. "If any changes were to be made to the new 2010 rates, it would favor a few groups at the expense of many other physicians and health care professionals. We are hopeful that Congress will realize that rates based on robust, independently corroborated data should not be second-guessed at this stage of the process."

The latest practice expense data is based on a new Physician Practice Information Survey conducted in 2008 under strict methodology outlined by CMS. The results were validated by The Lewin Group, an independent survey firm. CMS will phase in the new practice expense data over a 4-year period.

The survey design and methodology had the wide support of medical and other health care professional groups, including funding from CMS and the American Medical Association. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and the Government Accounting Office also had called for CMS to update data for all specialties.
 
[Source: APTA and PT Bulletin Online]