Medicare should increase payments to physicians for caring for Medicare patients and not decrease them as it has proposed, the Alliance of Safety-Net Hospitals wrote in a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in response to CMS’s proposed Medicare physician fee schedule for 2025, which calls for slashing physician payments.

“Physician practice costs are rising, not falling, and the proposed fee reduction fails to keep pace with the financial demands inherent in operating those practices,” ASH noted in its letter, adding that

The adequacy of Medicare rates is critical to physician practices – and especially to practices operated by or affiliated with community safety-net hospitals. Recruiting physicians to serve in geographically isolated rural areas and large urban communities where most of the residents are insured by public payers is a challenge, and often, community safety-net hospitals must subsidize the operation of those practices. Adequate Medicare payments are a vital tool in helping to ensure the financial viability of these physician practices, and without such payments, the continued ability of community safety-net hospitals to underwrite some of these practices’ costs would be in jeopardy. This would be bad for the communities, bad for the hospitals, and bad for Medicare, which has made a commitment to America’s seniors that it needs to uphold. ASH urges CMS to pay physicians adequate rates that enable the continued practice of medicine to remain a financially feasible endeavor in diverse, economically disadvantaged, and underserved communities across the country.

In its letter, ASH praised CMS for continuing to improve Medicare patients’ access to services that address their health-related social needs, citing in particular this year’s proposal to pay providers who train family caregivers in direct care techniques.

ASH also thanked CMS for preserving many of the pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities on which the patients of community safety-net hospitals and others have come to rely and encouraged the agency to continue working with Congress to find more ways to improve access to telehealth services.

Learn more about ASH’s response to the proposed 2025 Medicare physician fee schedule regulation in its formal comment letter to CMS.