Advocacy & Practice Updates — Advocacy & Practice
Physician Payment Update Dropped from Republican Agenda Bill
Late yesterday, portions of the Senate version of the Republican “One Big Beautiful Bill” tax and border legislation were released. The Senate version omits a House-passed provision to increase Medicare physician payment to reflect inflation.
As previously reported, the House version implemented an annual update to the physician fee schedule conversion factor based on the Medical Economic Index (MEI)—the main measure of inflation in medicine—for the first time. This was a significant development even though the provision only increases payment by 75% of MEI in 2026 and 10% of MEI in 2027 and years after—well below what is required to make up for years of cuts and lagging payments to physicians. Advocacy efforts are underway to ensure the physician payment provision is included in the final version of the bill, however, several Republican Senators have indicated that the House version of the bill did not include sufficient cost off-sets, so provisions that increase the overall cost are limited. Furthermore, significant cuts to Medicaid endanger the bill's chances of passage in general.
(Published 6.17.25)