2006 proposed fee schedule - American Society of Clinical Oncology

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reduce overall payments by 0.2 percent, it is necessary to
include a budget neutrality adjustment to the RVUs,
resulting in positive impacts for most specialties.) Table
33 below shows the percentage impact by specialty in
combination with other proposed changes.
Table 33 below shows the estimated change in average
payments by specialty, nonphysician practitioner, and
supplier, resulting from proposed changes to the calculation
of practice expense and malpractice RVUs, and the multiple
imaging procedure discount. The first column displays
Medicare allowed charges during 2004 for each specialty,
practitioner, and supplier. The practice expense changes
shown in the second column represent the first year impact
of a 4-year transition resulting from all practice expense
revisions including the adoption of the bottom-up approach
and the elimination of the nonphysician work pool. The
impact shown is identical to the first column of Table 30.
The malpractice impacts shown in the third column are
identical to those displayed above in Table 31. The fourth
column in Table 33 below demonstrates the impacts for each
specialty of the proposed multiple imaging procedure
discount. The fifth column shows the combined impact of all
proposed changes by specialty.
The largest impacts in this column are attributable to
the proposed changes to the PE methodology. The final