MSP Recovery Portal is Up and Running

The Center for Medicare Services (CMS) has just premiered it’s new Secondary Payer Recovery Portal, which promises to streamline the delivery of crucial information attorneys need to protect their clients in a personal injury recovery.

For years, the MSPRC has struggled to deliver the lien information attorneys need when resolving their clients’ injury claims. Hours on hold and months for written responses were the norms attorneys suffered with when trying to comply with Medicare’s antiquated reimbursement process. Recently, CMS let the contract with the vendor that had been administering the reimbursement process expire, letting another vendor take over the duties temporarily. The result was immediate: better response times and more efficient lien resolution. But the problems of the past still plagued the process.

Last year, CMS announced that it was developing a web-based portal, similar to its popular MyMedicare.gov website, which would give beneficiaries and their representatives instant access to information that traditionally took months to receive.

Today the registration process has opened and anyone with a Medicare reimbursement obligation (or a client with one) can register for access. A username and temporary password will then be mailed to the registrant, so I cannot provide any feedback about the portal itself, but this promises to be another step in the right direction for CMS when it comes to lien resolution.

Stay tuned – I will follow up on this post when I have had the chance to test drive the system. If you’re like me and register right away and let me know what you think.

Insurance Companies Lose, Consumers Win In Federal Court

Big news today, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made its decision in a case that consumers and their lawyers have been anxiously awaiting. CGI v. Rose is a case where a consumer used her employer’s health plan to pay for medical treatment after a car accident, and the employer argued that all of the settlement money belonged to them, not the consumer.

The Court of Appeals decided that while the employer is entitled to some reimbursement for what they spent on Ms. Rose’s medical treatment, they can’t take the whole thing. That decision is consistent with another one just decided by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, called US Airways vs. McCutchen.

This is a great win for consumers and for the lawyers who fought this issue.