Doctors — especially specialists — are pushing back against proposed changes to Medicare payment that would tamp down on reimbursement next year.

Medicare’s proposed physician fee schedule for 2026 includes a base rate hike of 2.5%. But it also includes an efficiency adjustment that would reduce payment by 2.5% for thousands of procedures and changes to how regulators calculate practice expense that would lower reimbursement for services performed in facilities like hospitals.

The reforms are meant to account for increased efficiency in procedures that doctors perform frequently, realign payment for primary and specialty care, and recognize larger indirect costs for doctors in office-based settings.

Many physicians support those goals. But the policy changes themselves are a bad idea,

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