Assessing Impact of Medicare Cuts

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHRIER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about fair physician reimbursement to urge my colleagues to immediately address the physician fee schedule cuts that went into effect on January 1, and in a broader sense, address chronically lagging Medicare physician care reimbursement.

Fundamentally, fair reimbursement respects the work that physicians do, and it keeps those physicians' practices open and available to patients so that seniors and others can get the care they need.

Over the past 22 years, adjusting for inflation, physicians have essentially taken a 26 percent pay cut from Medicare. This is in the context of everything else increasing, with expenses up about 47 percent.

I cannot think of another profession whose compensation has dropped by 26 percent over two decades.

If we continue down this path, we will soon find ourselves with loved ones or ourselves unable to find a physician because physician offices will close.

Because of CMS rules, on January 1, physicians just took a 3.4 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement. The least we can do is reverse that.

Last month, I co-led a letter with my colleagues encouraging a fix to this. Here is a way to do it: I co-led a bill that passed out of the Committee on Energy and Commerce that would level physician reimbursement from Medicare and keep it essentially unchanged this year.

Physicians are nervous, and, fundamentally, we need a longer term solution, and that means we need Medicare reimbursement to keep pace with inflation.

That is how we will keep these practices open. We are already seeing practices in rural communities and small towns closing their doors or being consolidated.

Without adequate reimbursement, we are going to see more of this, offices closing, and that will result in patients, seniors, and others who require or depend on Medicare not being able to access the high- quality care they need.

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