Medicare Set asides May Never Close Out
The Medicare set asides possibly possess no statute of limitations. We have received a large number of questions on my last post. I thought it was best to post the excerpt from the town hall meeting to make sure all of my readers know CMS’s position on MSAs.
The following is a transcript from a Town Hall teleconference. The most important part is in bold. That was a tough place to end the teleconference as the six-year statute of limitations question was being addressed by CMS.
TOWN HALL TELECONFERENCE
SECTION 111 OF THE MEDICARE, MEDICAID & SCHIP EXTENSION ACT OF 2007
42 U.S.C. 1395y(b) (8)
DATE OF CALL: December 15, 2009
SUGGESTED AUDIENCE: Liability Insurance (Including Self-Insurance), No-Fault Insurance, and Workers’ Compensation Responsible Reporting Entities- Question and Answer Session.
Question: Okay. And is there any – do you have any type of statute of limitations? I was told in a seminar that there’s a six-year statute of limitations. Is that correct? I hadn’t heard that before.
CMS: This could be another one of those instances where the answer is maybe yes, maybe no depending on what you want to tie to it. Generally, there is a statute of limitations in terms of how long you have to bring a litigation action. But there’s different rules in terms of when it runs from. And generally, anything we have doesn’t start to run until we have knowledge of the claim. And certainly in a liability situation it’s not the date of accident that controls. What we’re looking at is when there was any settlement, judgment, award or other payment. So we would have at least six years from that date.
Question: And after six years then you would no longer pursue recovery?
CMS: That’s not necessarily true. What I said is the six year statute of limitations is generally tied to when we can pursue action in court. But there are other recovery actions that we have that we can take as well.
Moderator: Okay Operator, I’m sorry but we’re going to have to close this call off now. Thank you everybody who was on it. We appreciate your questions. And for those who didn’t – we didn’t get your questions we’re sorry. We’ll be doing this call again – a call like this next month.
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