Physician Fee Schedule Corrections

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published the final rule with comment establishing the Medicare Part B physician fee schedule for CY 2010 (Rule). The fee schedule, which was published in the Federal Register on November 25, 2009, reflects a 21.2 percent cut in Medicare payments as mandated by the sustainable growth rate (SGR), adopted by Congress in 1997. As with prior years, Congress is expected to intervene to override the proposed reduction.

Medicare pays for physician services under a fee schedule methodology based on national uniform relative value units (RVUs) which are calculated on the basis of resources used in furnishing a service. The RVUs are converted to a dollar amount by application of a conversion factor.

CMS has released the corrections below to be published in the Federal Register December 10, 2009: