To confront healthcare costs, CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) is making efforts to crack down on imaging studies that it believes are not necessarily beneficial and that are very costly. The agency’s approach reduces payments by as much as 25 percent for some secondary images and subsequent images acquired in one session. The rule was enacted at the beginning of 2006. Most respondents (75 percent) view this as an effective way to try to control healthcare costs.
   
CMS also had been considering an additional 25 percent reduction to begin in 2007, but in an announcement last week withdrew the proposal.