Oregon Public Broadcasting

Medicare patients and their doctors may end up with a very complicated set of bills this month.

That’s because of fighting in the senate over whether to cut doctor reimbursement by 20 percent to bring down Medicare costs. Amelia Templeton reports.

The cut to the pay doctors get for treating patients on Medicare has been on the books for a decade.

Each year the cut gets a little bigger. And each year congress has voted to exempt the program from its spending limit to avoid the cut.

That’s not the case this year. On June 1st a twenty one percent cut to doctor reimbursement should have gone into effect. But the agency in charge of Medicare is still hoping congress will help.

It told doctors it would hold off processing their June claims Thursday.

Norm Cohen is an anesthesiologist at Oregon Health and Science University. He worries Oregon will be hurt by the cut because medical costs are less inflated here than in other states.

Norm Cohen: “it's going to make a lot of practices consider closing their doors to new Medicare patients and maybe not taking care of existing Medicare patients.”

A recent survey showed about 15 percent of doctors in Oregon already don’t take new Medicare patients. 

A senate bill that would have postponed the cut for a year failed to move forward earlier this week. The senate is now trying to rework the legislation.