Litigation

Bentzen on Medicare Secondary Payer and July 1, 2009- Fact or Fiction?

By John Darer

Rhonda Bentzen, gossip and factoring broker known for offering, paying and defending kickbacks to a significant number of structured settlement brokers and settlement planners (a practice proven to be at the expense of tort victims) has finally got off her duff to "write" another blog post that has nothing to do with what it is that she does (brokering cash to structured settlement payees who agree, or are convinced, to sell their rights). This time the post is about Medicare Set Aside Accounts and it is inaccurate.

Bentzen incorrectly claims that in July of 2009 "this scenario (creating Medicare Set Aside Accounts) will become applicable to Liabilty settlements as well as Worker's compensation cases"

This is an expansive topic but briefly, Congress enacted the Medicare Secondary Payer Statute in 1980 in response to the rising cost of Medicare. Enforcement of the MSP requirements did not effectively begin until 2001, then primarily for certain worker's compensation cases.

Beginning July 1, 2009, Section 111 ("Medicare Secondary Payer") of the Medicare Mediacid and SCHIP Extension Act of 2007 requires liability insurers ( this includes companies that self-insure, no-fault insurers and worker's compensation insurers) to:

1. Determine Medicare status for all claimants; and
2. Report all claims involving a Medicare beneficiary to CMS (the federal administrative agency responsible for administering Medicare and Medicaid) when those claims are resolved.

If the reporting for any claimant is not done in a timely manner, the Medicare Medicaid and SCHIP Extension Act (signed December 29, 2007) authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services (through its agency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services "CMS") to enforce a civil penalty of $1000 per day. These information requirements and penalty provisions certainly provide the basis for expanded enforcement by CMS of the Medicare Secondary Payer (MSP) statute, which has previously generally been limited to workers compensation claims.

In short July 1, 2009 represents a commencement date for a new reporting requirement, not what is  mischaracterized by Bentzen.

No doubt Bentzen will try to lay off the blame on the subject of her post, but the responsibility for the accuracy to what is written rests with the publisher where a presumed standard journalistic integrity will go beyond a mere cut and paste and actually involve a checking of the relevant facts BEFORE publishing a story.  In addition the Society of Settlement Planners 2008 Annual meeting program in March, which Bentzen attended and was a speaker, included one and a half hours of material in two presentations on point and related to the subject matter of Medicare Secondary Payer.

Full post as published by Structured Settlements 4Real on December 04, 2008 (boomark / email).