Glitch Cancels Some Medicare Part B Claims. Is Yours One of Them?

If you’re a Medicare Part B provider, you may need to delay billing some open balances until October 6 due to a glitch with a Medicare contractor. Learn if you’re affected and what you need to do:

Who’s affected?

Medicare Part B providers who bill clients with supplemental insurance are affected by this glitch. If none of your Part B clients have supplemental insurance, you should not be affected.

Note: If you directly bill your client’s supplemental insurer, this does not affect you.

What happened?

It’s a bit complicated, but here’s the short version: The entity that takes your Medicare claim and sends it to the supplemental carrier (whether that’s private insurance or Medicare) experienced a glitch. The issue prevented claims from reaching the supplemental insurer, so they were not billed for your remaining balance.

How does this affect me?

You may see a delay in receiving payments from some supplemental insurers for claims sent in the last few weeks. Many of the claims are now being processed and sent to the supplemental insurer.

Medicare contractor National Government Services asks that you don’t attempt to bill supplemental insurers for any unpaid balances until October 6, 2017. By then, the supplemental insurer should have received the delayed claim.

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What if I received a letter stating my claim was unable to be sent to the supplemental insurer?

If you received a letter stating your claim was not sent to the supplemental insurer, you will have to directly bill the supplemental insurer for the balance. Your claim will not be sent to them automatically.

Where can I learn more about this?

You can learn more about this glitch from National Government Services.

What if I don’t want to deal with this billing headache?

If you’d rather focus on more engaging tasks, check out BreezyBilling, our professional billing service just for therapists. You can leave these problems to professionals who focus on nothing but behavioral health billing (plus, you can use BreezyNotes EHR for free)!