Month: October 2017

The mayor of McKenzie, Tennessee asked Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) to hold Senate hearings on the abuse of Medicare billing revocations by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] in a letter sent on Wednesday. Writing “on behalf of the citizens of Northwest Tennessee,” Mayor Jill Holland asked Alexander, “as Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee [to] schedule, at the earliest opportunity, a hearing of the appropriate subcommittee to consider the revocation or modification of a particularly egregious Obama-Era regulation promulgated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in December, 2014, “Medicare Program; Requirements for the Medicare Incentive Reward Program and Provider Enrollment; Final Rule.” “This regulation, and its abusive implementation by CMS, is now jeopardizing the health care of hundreds of eventually thousands of citizens in and around McKenzie, Tennessee, our city of 5,000 residents in Carroll, Henry, and Weakley counties,” Holland wrote. Holland then cites the case of Dr. Bryan Merrick, a beloved local family doctor who has practiced medicine in McKenzie for more than thirty years with an unblemished reputation. Merrick is the West Tennessee doctor who “lost his Medicare reimbursement privileges over $670 in billing errors, and the consequences…