The Medicare program established a national fee schedule for Part B Laboratory Testing Services in 1984. This national fee schedule has never been comprehensively reformed, revised, updated, or restructured in the past 27 years. On December 5, 2007, a Medicare official let slip a comment at a public meeting that the pending competitive bidding demonstration in San Diego really didn’t matter to them (see below). This official stated that the their intent is to take the laboratory bids submitted on February 15, 2008 and use these as a prototype to design a new national Medicare Part B laboratory fee schedule. Thus, the entire laboratory profession faces a serious financial consequence from the competitive bidding demonstration project-an outcome that was not the official purpose, as tasked by Congress.
