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The rules say that plans must pay for a medical service or item if regular Medicare would pay for it in this case. 
You can find this rule at 42 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Section 422.101. 
 
The rules say that providers/suppliers must report services correctly. Procedures should be reported with the 
Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code that describes the services performed. You can find this rule in 
the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medicare National Correct Coding Initiative Policy Manual for 
Medicare Services, Chapter I(A). 
 
The rules say that the Correct Coding Initiative was developed to promote correct coding and to control 
improper coding leading to inappropriate payment in Part B claims. The Coding Policy Manual also explains 
what is referred to as Column One/Column Two Correct Coding and Mutually Exclusive Edits. These are code 
pairs that should not be reported together. Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) subject all line items 
for the same beneficiary, same National Provider Identifier (NPI), and same date of service to National Correct 
Coding Initiative (NCCI) edits. The National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI) File Formats continue to 
include a Correct Coding Modifier Indicator (CCMI) for the Column One / Column Two Correct Coding edit 
file. This indicator determines whether an NCCI Procedure to Procedure (PTP)-associated modifier causes the 
code pair to bypass the edit. You can find this rule in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Internet 
Only Manual, Publication 100-04, Medicare Claims Processing Manual, Chapter 23, Section 20.9. 
 
The rules say that effective for claims with dates of service July 1, 2007, and after, the non-Outpatient 
Prospective Payment System (OPPS) Outpatient Code Editor (OCE) will be integrated into the OPPS OCE. 
This integration will result in the routing of all institutional outpatient claims, including non-OPPS hospital 
claims, through a single integrated OCE eliminating the need to update two separate OCE software packages 
on a quarterly basis. The integrated OCE does not change the current logic that is applied to outpatient bill 
types that already pass through the OPPS OCE software. It merely expands the software usage to include non-
OPPS hospitals. This new software product will be referred to as the Integrated OCE (I/OCE). The I/OCE 
instructions and specifications are provided via Recurring Update Notifications. They are also posted on the Web at the following address 
https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/OutpatientCodeEdit/OCEQtrReleaseSpecs.  
 
You can find this information in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Internet-Only Manual, 
Publication 100-04, Medicare Claims Processing Manual, Chapter 4, Section 40.1. 
 
The rules say that Edit 40 is invoked when the procedure is identified as part of another procedure on the claim 
coded on the same day, where the modifier was either not coded or is not an NCCI modifier. Only the code in 
column 2 of a code pair is rejected; the column 1 code of the pair is not marked as an edit. The disposition for 
this edit is "Line Item Rejection" (LIR), which means that the specific line is rejected. You can find this 
information in the Integrated OCE Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Specifications V23.2 
Effective January 1, 2023. 
 
If you want to read these Medicare rules, you can go to this website www.medicareappeal.com. 
 
The Plan contract says that the Plan covers items and services in accordance with Medicare rules.