Berg, Rehberg Fight to Protect Frontier States Provision

Press Release

Congressmen Rick Berg (R-ND) and Denny Rehberg (R-MT) today urged members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to preserve the Frontier States provision, which ensures fair Medicare reimbursement to health care providers in frontier states.

"The Frontier States provision is about fairness," Berg stated. "The Frontier States provision has already helped reduce provider shortages and improve access to affordable care for our seniors. As we look for ways to get our fiscal house back in order, it's also critical that we support our priorities. We believe that the Frontier States provision is needed to protect seniors' access to care in rural states like North Dakota and Montana."

"The federal government needs to tighten its belt just like American families have, but we can't balance the budget on the backs of rural America," said Rehberg. "Health care in places like Montana and North Dakota face unique challenges that are fundamentally different from the challenges faced in places like New York City and San Francisco. The normal government one-size-fits-all approach simply cannot work."

Berg and Rehberg noted that hospitals and physicians in frontier states like North Dakota and Montana have been historically underpaid due to Medicare's flawed reimbursement formula. This discrepancy is corrected in the Frontier States provision by guaranteeing that both the floor for the area wage index for hospitals and the floor for the practice expense index for physicians' services is at least 1.00. The provision brings Medicare reimbursement rates for frontier states more in line with other states, where often the wage and practice expense indices exceed 1.00.

The Congressmen recognized the enormous challenge that the Joint Select Committee faces in identifying $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction and agreed that reevaluating government spending must be a top priority. They noted, however, that the small savings that repealing the Frontier States provision would seriously jeopardize seniors' access to care in North Dakota, Montana and other frontier states and requested that the provision be protected from potential cuts.

Other states benefitting from the Frontier States provision include Wyoming, Nevada and South Dakota.

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