To maintain physician participation in the program, Congress has made a habit of ignoring the SGR.
And folks have talked about SGR being part of it, and other things.
Designed to control spending on the enormous entitlement, the SGR tied Medicare expenditures to the growth rate of the economy.
Yet Dr Irwin, whose search for trails of stars from swallowed galaxies was broader, has found a clear one only from Sgr.
They think this could mean that the Milky Way has been pillaging stars not just from Sgr, but from its other satellites.
That will still leave a larger question: how common is Sgr's fate?
The alternative view, for those who like their galaxies light and fluffy, is that Sgr once orbited the Milky Way at a safer distance.
Wednesday: The weekly crude oil inventories are slated for release along with earnings from Shaw Group (nyse: SGR - news - people ).
The physician community had hoped that a deal would have brought resolution to the Medicare payment reductions doctors face each and every year as a result of the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula.
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To have stayed intact in the way that it has, according to Rosemary Wyse of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Sgr would need around 50 times as much dark matter as stellar matter.
The pay cut was called for under an old formula called the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) that governs how much doctors are paid to treat seniors on Medicare and military families enrolled in the TRICARE program.
The reductions are the result of the now infamous sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula that, if not delayed once again, will result in physicians taking a 27 percent cut in the reimbursement rate they receive from Medicare.
But looking specifically at the SGR fix, most of the savings that you -- the pay-fors for that fix are coming in the out-years, not in the years where you're actually going to be fixing the payment level.
Hong-Sheng Zhao of Leiden University in the Netherlands calculates that a close encounter with another one of the Milky Way's satellites, the Large Magellanic Cloud, could have knocked Sgr into a closer orbit two or three billion years ago.
Further, the SGR issue is about to become a thing of the past as Congress moves toward reaching a permanent solution to the problem created by an outdated formula that puts physicians in a position of taking major pay cuts from Medicare each year.
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