2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

from the cost reports. To avoid double counting and to
ensure all of the market basket weights still totaled 100
161
percent, we removed this additional 1.758 percentage points
for benefits from pharmaceuticals, administrative and
general, supplies, laboratory services, housekeeping and
operations, and the capital components. This calculation
reapportions the benefits expense for each of these
categories using a method similar to the method used for
distributing non-direct patient care salaries as described
above. This method approximates the proportion of each cost
center’s costs that are benefits using available salary
expenditure data.
(4) Professional Fees
Professional fees include accounting, bookkeeping, and
legal expenses. We derived the weight for professional fees
from the BES since the Medicare cost reports do not include
this level of detail. We first calculated the ratio of BES
professional fees for kidney dialysis centers to total BES
wages and salaries for kidney dialysis centers. We applied
this ratio to the total wages and salaries share calculated
from the cost reports to estimate the proportion of ESRD
facility professional fees. The resulting weight was 0.903
percent. To avoid double counting, this proportion was
deducted from the calculated weight for the administrative