WASHINGTON — The Bush administration said yesterday it will delay paying doctors for treating Medicare patients in early July to give Congress more time to block a scheduled 10.6% fee cut.

The move by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services doesn’t block the cut, scheduled to take place today. It’s up to Congress to decide that.

But to give Congress more time to act, the agency will instruct its contractors to delay the processing of any physician or non-physician Medicare claims for health care services given during the first 10 business days of July. Claims for services received on before June 30 will be processed as usual.

CMS will not be making any payments at the 10.6% reduced rate until July 15, at the earliest, an agency spokesman, Jeff Nelligan, said. The delay in processing claims likely means that claims that would have been paid mid-July won’t be paid until late in the month.

Another option would have been to issue on-time payments at the lower rate and pay the rest later after Congress fixes the problem.

Congress, facing the prospect of millions of angry seniors at the polls in November, will be under tremendous pressure to act quickly when it returns to Washington the week of July 7 to prevent the cuts in payments for some 600,000 doctors who treat Medicare patients. The cuts were scheduled because of a formula that requires fee cuts when spending exceeds established goals.

But Senate Republicans and the White House are in a standoff with Democrats seeking to cut subsidies to insurance companies that provide Medicare coverage to “pay for” easing the payment cuts to doctors. There’s no guarantee the standoff will be broken soon.

Lawmakers on all sides promise that if the impasse goes on and doctors receive the lower payments, they’ll get repaid retroactively through automatically reprocessed claims. That’s more difficult than it sounds, given the millions of Medicare claims that have to be processed every day. A comparable situation that occurred in early 2006 took six months to fully fix.

The HHS secretary, Mike Leavitt, had promised Friday that his agency “will take all steps available to the department under the law to minimize the impact on providers and beneficiaries.” Yesterday, the department used its administrative tools to delay implementing the scheduled 10.6% cuts.