Good reading from Medical Economics...if you can make sense of all of it...the article here does help but overall the entire issue is still very confusing and yet vague...BD
Besides the good and bad news, some Stark revisions are harder to pigeonhole. CMS has now withdrawn this safe harbor, leaving some physicians feeling adrift and unprotected. "On the one hand, CMS acknowledges that doctors are entitled to provide certain ancillary services as part of their practices, which patients really like," says attorney Linda Baumann, a partner with Arent Fox, in Washington, DC. "But, at the same time, CMS doesn't appear sympathetic at all to doctors who feel undercompensated by the Medicare fee schedule and, therefore, entitled to make up the revenue by providing ancillary services." In short, to the extent that ancillaries now constitute a potential profit center for physicians, they're likely to face tighter and tighter government regulation.
What's less in dispute is that, for the near future at least, Stark will be a moving target, subject to continual change. And that's a troubling prospect for some observers. Says D'Emanuele: "From one perspective, the substance of Stark is less important than that it be reliable enough so that people can adjust and comply with it. If CMS changes things significantly on a yearly basis, it puts in great doubt what hospitals and doctors can reliably do going forward."
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