As you should understand, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is planning additional cuts to Medicare reimbursement for cancer care. In addition to a scheduled cut of 21.5% to all physician-related services, CMS is planning to cut payments to oncology by a net 6%. In brief, these cuts are based on a survey conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA), which the Community Oncology Alliance (COA) told the AMA was flawed for community oncology.

On the COA website at www.communityoncology.org under the Immediate Action Needed section is a tool that will allow you to estimate the impact of changes proposed by CMS in the 2010 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. We encourage you to use the tool to estimate the impact of the cuts on your practice. The leadership team of the COA Administrators’ Network used the tool and collectively found the following:

• Oncology-specific cuts related to infusion room services are estimated to be 20.6% in 2010.
• The total impact of the cuts is 6.4%, factoring in an increase in E&M payments and the elimination of the consultation codes.

Please note that these estimates assume that Congress will act in health care reform legislation to avert the 21.5% cut. If this does not happen, the total estimated impact of the Medicare cuts would be 26.5% for oncology practices. Run the estimates for your practice. If you have any questions about using the tool, please contact Ricky Newton .

Understanding the impact of these proposed cuts is important because COA is challenging them and will be providing instructions on how every community oncology practice should weigh in with CMS and their Members of Congress. We also encourage every practice to return the Components of Care Survey, which can also be accessed on the COA website. Armed with actual community oncology data is critical in supporting our ask. The time is now to send in your data if you want to reverse the cuts slated for oncology.

In addition to these reductions, there are planned cuts to diagnostic imaging and therapeutic radiation. We will provide more information on those.