Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise have pledged to address pay cuts for doctors treating Medicare patients in Republicans’ party-line package to enact broad swaths of President Donald Trump’s agenda, a key lawmaker said Monday
It comes after leaders decided not to include it in a government funding bill as initially planned.
In a social media post, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), who co-chairs the GOP Doctors Caucus, said that GOP leadership would include a fix to the payment cuts, mandated by a formula that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say doesn’t reflect rising costs, in that bill to be passed through the budget reconciliation process.
Spokespeople for Johnson and Scalise didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
House GOP leadership had previously been open to including the provisions in a stopgap funding bill to keep the government funded after this week, but it was not ultimately included amid broader concerns among Republican leadership that adding more than standard extensions of programs would open the door to more demands for other policies to be attached.
Murphy said in an interview last week that the issue was a “line in the sand” for his vote on the continuing resolution to keep the government open.
This provision was part of a larger health care overhaul package set to pass as part of a year-end government funding bill in December, but then-President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk complained the bill was overly broad, and the package got scrapped. At that time, Murphy said he got assurances from the incoming administration that the measure preventing the doctors’ pay cuts would be included in the next funding bill.
Supporters of addressing the issue warn the stakes are high for not addressing this issue quickly: Decades of payment reductions in Medicare have put physician practices in difficult financial straits, doctors groups say — meaning they could be forced to close their practices and reduce access to care.
The biggest barrier historically to addressing the payment cuts, which Congress often mitigates in spending packages, has been the price tag. Doctors and their allies in Congress have been pushing for a longer-term solution to avoid the annual cycle of addressing cuts. Murphy said in his post on X Monday that the provisions in the party-line package are “hopefully long term.”
