Medicare physician fees are scheduled to be reduced by 27.4 percent on January 1, unless Congress acts to override that reduction or eliminate the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism that is used to determine the annual update. In a new blog post, Commonwealth Fund vice president Stuart Guterman says that Congress must no longer "kick the can down the road" by temporarily overriding the physician fee cuts but instead "take the difficult but necessary step of repealing and replacing the SGR."
