Litigation

MMSEA Reporting Deadline Apparently Gets Extended Again

By Bruce Nye

This is kind of weird.  For nearly a year, we've known that the revised deadilne for "RREs" (that's Medicare speak for insurers and self-insureds who have to electronically report  personal injury settlements with actual or potential Medicare recipients) was January 1, 2011.  By that date, RREs were supposed to report all settlements occuring on or after October 1, 2010.

Late last week, our friend and colleague Robbie Foster, from South Carolina's Nelson Mullins, sent me word (and a bulletin) that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services had just continued the compliance dates:  the reporting date was apparently moved a year, to January 1, 2012 and applied to settlements after October 1, 2011.  So we went to the CMS web site to try to find evidence of this.  But there was nothing about it on the "Overview" page.  Nothing on the "What's New" page, either.  Nor on the page for Liability and self-insureds. 

So the crack research staff at  CBL did what any careful, detail-oriented group of legal scholars would do:  put a phrase from the bulletin ("Revised Implementation Timeline for TPOC Liability") into the Google search box and touched "enter."  The result was a link, not to the CMS web site, and which, when clicked, lead to this:

Well, ok, over here at CBL, we  like to live dangerously and everything, but we still need our computers and our network to practice law, so we opted for "Get me out of here."

Next, we took the same phrase and put it in the search box at the CMS web site.  And that did indeed take us to the bulletin, located in "NGHP Alerts."  In other words, CMS took a critical bulletin, involving the Medicare / MMSEA issue that American businesses and insurers are most concerned about, and  hid it in a web site section with an acronym that nobody understands. 

In any event, that seems to be the story:

The required submission of liability insurance (including self-insurance) initial claim reports has been changed from the first calendar quarter of 2011 to the first calendar quarter of 2012 for all liability insurance (including self-insurance) TPOC amounts with no ORM involvement. Liability insurance (including self-insurance) ORM reporting is not subject to this delay.
Liability insurance (including self-insurance) TPOCs must be reported if the TPOC Date is on or after 10/1/2011.

Or at least, the deadlines are extended for companies willing to dig deep, deep and deeper into CMS's web site to try to find that information.  But NB:  this affects reporting only.  The extension does not have any impact on the obligation of plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers and everybody else to protect the interests of Medicare when they settle personal injury cases with potential Medicare involvement.  For more on this, see our white paper here.

Full post as published by CalBizLit on November 15, 2010 (boomark / email).