Long-awaited Medicare drug bill passes House, Senate

After much deliberation and controversy, Congress has passed a bill to overhaul the current Medicare system and provide a prescription drug benefit to senior citizens. For physicians, passage of the bill means that reimbursement rates will rise 1.5% annually for the next 2 years, instead of being cut 4.5% as previously proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The House passed the Medicare bill early Saturday morning, Nov. 22, after an all-night debate. The Senate passed the bill on Tuesday, Nov. 25, after halting a Democratic-led filibuster and bypassing objections raised on budgetary grounds.

The bill will limit geographic adjustments to physician payments and increase payments to physicians serving in rural areas, according to a report in American Medical News. In addition, the bill preserves the Current Procedural Terminology codes, provides reforms for better communications between Medicare and health care providers and contains a provision for voluntary, not mandatory, electronic prescribing.

A major focus of debate over the bill has been the prescription drug benefit, an issue that divided the House and Senate largely along party lines. To provide the drug benefit, the bill will give private insurers the ability to engage in competition for Medicare patients. Democrats and others who opposed the bill argued that the government should be able to use its buying power to negotiate drug prices, but this was not in the final version of the bill.

The House bill passed 220 to 215; in the Senate, the vote was 54 to 44.