CMS PAYMENT CUTS REVERSED BY 50% 

Practitioners have seen payment cuts repeatedly. Specific to the world of physical therapy, there have been drastic cuts with MPPR, PTA 15% cut, and the 2% sequester after COVID, and more small cuts every year.

With profit margins hovering at 3-15% for most physical therapy clinics, these cuts have been a serious blow to operations when the rising cost of delivering care is at an exponential pace and hard to overcome. 

Congress did, however, pass a law, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024 (H.R. 4366), that will reduce Medicare Part B cuts from 3.4% to 1.7% for the remainder of 2024. This is not a full win, but a win nonetheless! 

AMA LOOKING INTO THE RPM/RTM CODES 

The San Diego AMA conference in February was supposed to address some possible additional and changing to RPM/RTM codes that made the use of these codes easier to deploy.  The changes involve allowing less days of monitoring at a different code and rate. However, this was pushed off for now.   

Meanwhile, we still contend that if any changes are to take place, we are advocating for: 

1. the 30-day data code and interaction codes line up together at 30-day cycles  
2. global period is NOT a factor in being reimbursed for RPM/RTM; What a more impactful time to stop re-admission than during the post-op period?