CMS has been increasing its effort to recover money paid erroneously to injured workers’ whose medical benefits should have been paid by their employers or workers’ compensation insurance carriers. In an effort to reduce the CMS “pay and chase” activity, Congress enacted mandatory reporting by insurance carriers so that CMS could enforce the MSP {Medicare Secondary Payer Act] and reduce cost shifting at earlier stages of the claim while enhancing its recovery activity.
“(Tracy) Meador: 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[ Barbara Wright: 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.
(Tracy) Meador: And after six years then you would no longer pursue recovery?
[CMS] Barbara Wright: 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.”
