In follow up to my posts on MSAs, I had the chance to interview Peter Foley of the American Insurance Association yesterday. Peter is quite knowledgeable about MSAs, the Medicare Secondary Payer Act, CMS’ perspectives, and how this affects payers. He’d be the first to say he is not an “expert”, but in my view he is certainly one of them.
Here is our conversation – and I hope I got it right.
What payers are affected by MSP Act?
All payers – group, Self-Insured (SI) and non group health plans, workers comp auto general liability etc. – including claims where no medicals have been or can be paid. (E.g a claim on an accountant’s E&O insurance)
Does any payer have to file an MSA w CMS?
No. It is not statutorily required and never has been, it has been recommended but not required.
Why do payers send MSAs to CMS?
The payer thinking is in some way they can use a submission as a defense against Medicare coming back to them and say the payer did not take Medicare’s interest into account when settling the claim. While it does not definitively protect the payer from future action but does show that at that point in time they made an effort to protect Medicare’s interest.
If a company stops sending in MSAs, they may be concerned that CMS would think there’s a problem and perhaps subject them to more scrutiny.
Is there a “safe harbor” in regards to MSAs?
There is no safe harbor.
After an MSA is established and set aside does the payer have any protection from future action from CMS?
No. One can’t prevent the federal government from asserting its perceived rights if it so chooses.
It appears the backlog has come down, but other sources indicate it has not. What do you see?
Medicare doesn’t make available what is submitted or processing times they simply capture how many MSAs they have approved for how much in what time frame. The only data available is what individual companies report on their own.
There is no available comprehensive data on turnaround time – MSA companies have repeatedly asked CMS to bring more transparency to the process; my interpretation of transparency is data on the number of submissions, timeframes, and financial data. The problem that CMS has is they only capture numbers of MSAs approved, the date they are approved, and value of those set asides. We and they don’t know when or if the settlements have been finalized or indeed if the claim was settled at all. CMS does not report submission and approval dates, just approval date – what has been made available is just that.
There is no consistent reporting from CMS on those data points, much of the information available required a specific request to CMS, or may have come from congressional testimony.
The information currently available is limited and sporadic and not generalizable to the entire MSA population.
MCM – There’s some hope that legislation currently pending in Congress will provide some relief. There are two bills, a House and Senate version, which appear to be pretty similar.
The bill will be scored (to assess its impact on the budget and deficit) while the Senate and House are out for election and will score favorably. The hope is it will be attached to a bill and considered in the lame duck session. The American Bar Association endorsed it yesterday joining a broad coalition that includes the plaintiff bar, self-insured employers, AIA, and the Property Casualty Insurance Ass’n. More on this from Jennifer Jordan here.
Key elements of the bill:
- Requires federal govt to adhere to state WC laws
- Codifies current procedures which otherwise could be changed at any time without prior notification.
- Allows for parties to submit funds directly to CMS if mutually agreed upon
- Also includes a separate appeals process on the MSA determination.
Peter – “We are asking for transparency and clarity, and insurers, plaintiffs bar, and self insured employers are all supporting this bill.”
Thanks to Peter for his time, and to AIA for allowing a pseudo-journalist to interview one of their staff for the record.
From my admittedly uneducated perspective, CMS’s position, stance, and requirements border on the ludicrous.
Insurers and self-insured entities will be required to send data on essentially ALL claims to CMS, where the data will likely sit for eons, hopefully untouched unless some hacker gets in and steals all the personal health information, SSNs, and other data, an event that is only possible because CMS requires payers to send it to CMS.
What does this mean to you?
While I applaud the thinking behind the Medicare Secondary Payer Act (taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for services that an insurer or employer should be liable for), the powers that be at CMS have taken that thinking and turned it into an expensive, ridiculously burdensome, wholly-unnecessary, potentially dangerous and likely pointless exercise.
