There are new rules and regulations in healthcare that come out every fiscal year. I’ve worked in rehab management for over 20 years and we go through billing and coding changes every September CMS releases their new coding and diagnosis
guidelines and how billings can be coded etc. Every department in the hospital who charges patients has to go
through this process. Some years suck because of the changes, and others are not so bad.
And just a fun little fact, the reason that PT and ST are lumped together is that when they originally came out with the ruling for the caps (years ago),
that when CMS was typing up the ruling, they forgot the comma and would not make a correction to separate the two
disciplines.
There is a lot we can hang on Obama’s head, but this is not one of them
I know there are new regulations every year. My wife is a coding specialist.
But, the elephant in the room is this: our government-paid health care is based on a prosperity model where we can afford to pay for whatever people want (OT for a retired person???). When the economy could support it, this was acceptable; but now we can’t afford it. We simply do not have the money.
As I said, its too hard to make cuts because someone’s ox will always be gored, so lets just keep going until the whole system crashes then we can do 100% cuts across the board.