The Medicare Rights Center (Medicare Rights) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the CY26 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) proposed rule. Medicare Rights is a national, nonprofit organization that works to ensure access to affordable and equitable health care for older adults and people with disabilities through counseling and advocacy, educational programs, and public policy initiatives. Each year, Medicare Rights provides services and resources to over three million people with Medicare, family caregivers, and professionals.
General Comments
Our comments are informed by our work helping beneficiaries, including callers to our National Helpline, navigate, understand, access, and afford their care. Based on this experience, we know many people with Medicare want and need to maintain deep and trusting relationships with their providers. Finding the right provider fit, spending time with that provider, and staying with that provider over the years is a priority for many people across Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage.
These learnings drive us to support efforts within this rule to rebalance payment and bolster primary care and freestanding physician offices. We urge the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to prioritize increased access to and financial support of these providers to avoid having yet more practices swallowed up by large health systems and private equity—a trend that is disruptive and expensive for beneficiaries.
We also support the efforts to use more empirical, repeatable data for payment instead of erratic self-reporting and polls that measure only a fraction of participating providers.
But we strenuously object to any attempt to end or reverse efforts to build up the diversity of the health care workforce, to remove equity components from quality measures, to lessen requirements around language access, or to backslide on the promise of making Medicare coverage and the health system as a whole places where the dignity and worth of individuals, as well as their families and communities, can thrive.
