CMS Reissued Thirteen Pages to Change One Digit
Transmittal 13943 rescinds and replaces the October SNF consolidated billing update CMS published on August 21. A full-text diff of the two versions turns up exactly one substantive change: a year in the policy section, 2025 corrected to 2026. Everything else in this radar is what did not publish, including five straight days with zero coverage-policy changes across all twelve MAC jurisdictions.
CMS rescinded a thirteen-page transmittal on Tuesday and replaced it with a thirteen-page transmittal.
The document is Transmittal 13943, Change Request 14561, the October quarterly update to the HCPCS codes used for skilled nursing facility consolidated billing enforcement. It supersedes Transmittal 13881, issued August 21.
Effective date, implementation date, subject line and code lists are unchanged.
We ran a full-text diff of the two PDFs. One substantive line differs.
"What has to be wrong in a published instruction before CMS pulls the whole thing back?"
One Digit, Eleven Days
The rescission note says it outright: 13881 is "being rescinded and replaced by Transmittal 13943, dated September 1, 2026, to revise the policy section, which should be effective July 01, 2026, and not July 01, 2025, for the Part A file updates. All other information remains the same."
Here is the entire delta, after normalizing whitespace and reading every hunk by hand:
- Effective July 01, 2025
+ Effective July 01, 2026
Everything else that moved between the 487 lines of the old version and the 465 of the new one is the business-requirement grid repaginating, identical rows sliding across a page break.
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