The Week CMS Put a Clock on Its Own Contractors
A rewritten provider-audit manual gives MACs 90 days to answer a reopening request and 18 months to settle an unaudited cost report, the first published deadlines that run against the contractor rather than you. Plus a Medicaid ABA toolkit that prices four years of growth at 421 percent and hands states the billing patterns to go looking for.
If you have ever asked a MAC when your open cost report is getting settled, you know the answer has always had the same shape. Soon. Sometime. After the audit plan clears.
Nothing in the manual obligated anyone to say more, because the timeliness standards in Chapter 8 of the Medicare Financial Management Manual described what you owed the contractor.
CMS rewrote that chapter on July 30. No rate moved this week. What moved is who has a deadline.
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The impact tables, the code-level detail, and the rest of the analysis sit past this line.
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