Assembly Panels Schedule Hearing on Medical Fee Reforms

The New York Assembly Labor and Insurance committees have scheduled a hearing Dec. 19 to take testimony on a proposal by the State Workers' Compensation Board to convert its medical fee schedule to the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale used by Medicare. On July 28, as part of its Business Process Re-Engineering Project, the state board released a "discussion document" noting that the workers' compensation medical fee schedule has remained virtually unchanged for 20 years. The board announced plans to hire a vendor to benchmark the current fee schedule to rates actually be...