2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

visits for their patients with chronic illnesses.) We
believe that by providing feedback to physicians
individually and by working with physician groups to
308
understand and respond to the overall trends, we can provide
more useful information and support physicians’ efforts to
run more efficient practices.
Finally, we continue to work closely with the medical
community, Congress, MedPAC, and others toward a long-term
approach ensuring adequate physician payments in the future
while also ensuring Medicare’s payments are made only for
care that is necessary and beneficial. We are particularly
interested in comments that build on recent progress on
payment reforms to promote higher quality and avoid
unnecessary costs, and that are consistent with the
President’s budgetary goal of paying for better value in
Medicare without increasing overall Medicare costs. For
example, we are interested in ways to promote higher-quality
ambulatory care that can achieve offsetting savings by
avoiding complications or unnecessary services. In
addition, it has been suggested that we have the authority
to make certain administrative adjustments in the SGR
methodology, such as removing Part B drug payments from the
calculation of both projected and actual expenditures
(retroactive to 1996) that are used to set the spending
target. Doing so would likely increase Medicare costs