Military Officer - February 2008 - (Page 33) washingtonscene Four-star Guard chief: Establishes the chief of the National Guard Bureau as a four-star position. Punting on Doctor Payments Deal delays cuts six months Kicking this political football out of bounds might not technically be a foul. But it’s a huge potential penalty for military and Medicare beneficiaries, who could find their doctors turning them away if Congress keeps flirting with these big payment cuts. T hroughout 2007, members of Congress knew they’d have to do something by the end of the year to stop the 9.9-percent cut in Medicare and TRICARE payments to doctors scheduled in January 2008 if Congress didn’t change the law. But they also knew coming up with the money to pay for that fix was going to be a problem. They thought they might cut payments to insurance companies that run Medicare HMOs and several other kinds of providers that some contend are overreimbursed. But those potential groups all had their own lobbyists fighting to keep their ox from being gored. By waiting until right before Christmas to approve a payment fix, Hill leaders thought legislators anxious to get home for the holidays might be pressured into accepting a deal to stop the cuts for at least another year. But that strategy didn’t work out very well. In football terms, the best Congress could do before adjourning for the year amounted to a 20-yard punt out of bounds. Instead of a 9.9-percent payment cut in January, Medicare and TRICARE doctors will see a 1-percent increase — for the six months from January to June 2008. But if Congress doesn’t find the money to extend the fix beyond the first half of 2008 (which won’t get any easier in an election year than it was in 2007), an 11-percent payment cut will kick in July 1. VA Retro Payments Delayed Thousands due money are left waiting I t was just over a year ago that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) and the VA first initiated “VA retro” payments to approximately 133,000 disabled retirees who were eligible for new concurrent receipt legislation and filed a VA claim since Congress authorized payment of combat-related special compensation (CRSC) in June 2003 or concurrent retirement and disability pay (CRDP) in 2004. DFAS and the VA established a selfimposed deadline to complete the payments by Nov. 15, 2007. But that date has long since come and gone, and files of approximately 49,000 retirees are still in the queue waiting for payment. Providing retroactive compensation has proven far more complex than originally envisioned. The 49,000 remaining files involve complicated calculations stemming from such things as multiple VA rating adjustments, shifts by retirees between CRDP and CRSC (dual-eligibles can switch back and forth between the programs every year, depending on which program would pay them more that year), ex-spouse pay entitlements, and any other issues that require lengthy record searches and hand-calculation of the respective benefits payable to a given individual under the two programs. FEBRUARY 2008 MILITARY OFFICER 33
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