The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee have jointly issued a White Paper proposing the repeal of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate Formula, entitled SGR Repeal and Medicare Physician Payment Reform.

The SGR white paper acknowledges that the Sustainable Growth Rate formula is “fundamentally broken” and that application

CMS has issued the poroposed Medicare Physician Fee Schedule. Without Congressional intervention, the SGR will mandate a 24.4% decrease. CMS sent its calcuations to the Medare Payment Advisory Commission.

http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Payment/SustainableGRatesConFact/Downloads/SGR2013-Final-Signed.pdf

CMS has also issued a Fact Sheet Summary:

http://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Fact-Sheets/2013-Fact-Sheets-Items/2013-07-08.html?DLPage=1&DLSort=0&DLSortDir=descending

The Social Security Act requires CMS to provide annual estimates to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) for both the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Conversion Factor (SCF) and the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). According to the letter just released by Jonathan Blum, Deputy Administrator and Director for CMS, the 2012 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Conversion Factor

The stalled healthcare reform initiative leaves the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule problem of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) imposed 21.5% reduction as a stand alone separate issue. The physician fee schedule decrease was postponed for 2 months by an Obama addition to a defense approriation bill, with the expectation that a long term solution would