Recently, Congress passed, and the President signed, S. 610, the Protecting Medicare & American Farmers from Sequester Cuts Act into law. The law positively impacted Medicare payments for family physicians in 2022 in multiple ways.
As part of its implementation of S. 610, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released a new, updated 2022 Medicare physician fee schedule conversion factor (i.e., the amount Medicare pay per relative value unit). The updated conversion factor will be $34.6062. That is less than the 2021 conversion factor of $34.8931 but more than the conversion factor of $33.59 that CMS planned to implement before passage of S. 610. The updated conversion factor is included in newly updated spreadsheets on the CMS website.
Using the new conversion factor and accounting for other changes in S. 610, the American Medical Association (AMA) estimates family physicians will see no change in their total Medicare allowed charges in the first quarter of 2022, a substantial improvement over the -8.7% change the AMA estimates would have occurred in the absence of S. 610. The AMA estimates most other physician specialties will experience a decrease in their total Medicare allowed charges even with the changes made by S. 610.