President Signs Medicare, SCHIP Extension Bill: Further Imaging Cuts Avoided

On Dec. 29, President Bush signed The Medicare, Medicaid, and State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) Extension Act of 2007 which replaces a 10.1 percent physician pay cut, statutorily required by the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula, with a 0.5 percent update to physician payments for the first six months of 2008. This would require Congress to address another SGR cut which could take place July 1, 2008. The bill also extends funding for SCHIP through March of 2009.

The legislation was recently passed by unanimous consent in the Senate and by a vote of 411-3 in the House after compromise talks surrounding a more comprehensive bill fell apart.

The ACR was successful in advocating that any legislation delaying the overall physician SGR cut not be paid for by additional cuts to medical imaging. Billions of dollars in additional cuts to imaging had been called for by the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection (CHAMP) Act which passed the House in August. Also avoided in the latest package was a provision in CHAMP that divided physician services, including imaging, into separate categories each with its own target growth rate. Under this scenario, medical imaging would have been subjected to steeper cuts than other services due to its higher growth rate.

Several ACR-backed initiatives that congressional sources say would have likely been included in a more comprehensive House-Senate compromise bill will have to wait until next year to be considered. These include mandatory accreditation requirements for providers of MR, CT, PET, and nuclear medicine, an imaging appropriateness criteria pilot, separate billing of the TC and PC, and an imaging referral disclosure requirement. 

Delaying the SGR cuts without reforming the system means that further cuts to the technical component of imaging will most likely be back on the table as Congress scrambles for additional revenue to pay for another “fix” in early 2008. The ACR will once again fight any proposed imaging cuts in 2008 and push for accreditation and other responsible utilization policies while continuing to seek a moratorium on the cuts contained in the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) of 2005.

For further information, please contact ACR’s Senior Director of Government Relations Josh Cooper at jcooper@acr.org, or ACR’s Assistant Director of Congressional Affairs Orrin Marcella at omarcella@acr.org.