Good morning everybody! It's a new week, I hope everyone is feeling good after the 4th of July weekend. I know a lot of you are just now getting back to work, so I will make this entry short in order to keep HR 6331 fresh in your mind today.

As you probably know from my blogs last week, the Senate failed to pass HR 6331 before the 4th of July holiday, so they have until 7/10 (this Thursday) to pass it before the 10% cut in Medicare becomes law. Medicare has agreed not to process any Medicare claims until the 10th to give Senate time to visit this bill.

This proposed cut in Medicare will directly effect the number of Physical therapy jobs as well as occupational therapy jobs with skilled nursing facilities throughout the country. I wanted to post this blog to serve as a call to arms for everyone in the therapy world. Use this link to contact your senators today, make sure you tell everyone you can to contact their state's representatives to tell them that this bill is important to you.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Don't let your advocacy stop with yourself, be sure to tell other therapists, assistants, nurses, aides, and even patients to help with this fight. The proposed cut in Medicare moving forward would be bad news for everyone. We will be keeping a close eye on this issue as it develops, hopefully we will have good news to share with you all soon.

That's it for right now, I'm off to call my senators! Best of luck!

For more information on this issue and how it effects physical therapy payments from Medicare, see www.apta.org