The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is urging Congress against boosting pay for radiologists and other physicians in 2021, officials announced on Friday.
Commissioners are pushing a 0% fee-for-service reimbursement hike in the federal payment program, noting that patients appear to have ample access to care.
“Overall, beneficiary access to clinician services is stable and comparable with that for privately insured individuals,” commissioners wrote in the 563-page report, issued March 13. “Consistent with prior years, most beneficiaries continue to report that they are able to find a new doctor without a problem, and the vast majority of beneficiaries report being satisfied with their care, having a usual source of care and having no trouble accessing timely care.”
MedPAC noted that median physician compensation from all payers grew by about 18.6% between 2014 and 2018. However, pay remains “much lower” for primary care physicians when compared to other specialties, such as radiology—“continuing to raise concerns about the mispricing of fee schedule services and its impact on primary care.”
Radiologists are one of the specialties with the highest median compensation, MedPAC noted, citing data from SullivanCotter. The specialty’s median pay of $448,000 is about 85% higher than median compensation for primary care, at about $243,000. However, the latter is seeing its pay grow slightly faster, at 17.6% between 2014 and 2018, compared to about 12.8% for radiology.
The new report also noted that use of advanced imaging in Medicare appears to have slowed, possibly spurred partly by MedPAC’s recommendations on this issue. Between 2017 and 2018, the rate of imaging encounters grew by just 0.7%, compared to 2.7% in anesthesia and 2.8% for “other procedures.”
At the individual modality level, x-ray volume grew by about 1.5% in 2018 versus average growth of about -1.3% from 2013 to 2017. CT volume moved up by 4.7% (versus 3.7% in the years prior); MRI went up 2% (vs. -3.6%); and nuclear medicine grew by 2.6% (vs. -0.2%).
MedPAC’s recommendations are nonbinding and will need to be taken up by Congress before implementation.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.