The Alliance of Specialty Medicine wrote a letter in support of H.R. 8163, the bipartisan Provider Reimbursement Stability Act, which seeks to modernize the budget neutrality mechanism of the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (MPFS) and improve stability for physician reimbursement and patient access.
Physician reimbursement has been subject to year-over-year payment reductions, threatening the viability of physician practices. This is due to the MPFS updates’ failure to keep pace with inflation or reflect current practice expense data. Moreover, physicians are still experiencing the impact of significant redistribution resulting from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implementation of increased relative values for certain evaluation and management (E/M) services, which triggered a significant redistribution of payments and negatively impacted many medical specialties.
The continued instability of the MPFS has led physicians to limit the number of Medicare patients they see or to consolidate their practices with larger hospital or health care systems, thereby increasing costs to the Medicare program. Other physicians will simply retire early and permanently close their doors.
H.R. 8163, introduced by Reps. Greg Murphy (R-NC) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) aims to reduce payment volatility, update practice cost evaluations, and prevent automatic cuts caused by an outdated $20 million budget-neutrality threshold by increasing it to $54 million and indexing it to the Medicare Economic Index (MEI). You can read the full letter by clicking on the link below.
Alliance of Specialty Medicine support letter HR 8163 Provider Reimbursement Stability Act
