Washington, D.C. — In response to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issuing its final 2026 Medicare physician fee schedule, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement.

“For too long, Medicare has outsourced physician payment policy to the American Medical Association (AMA), a specialist-dominated physician lobbying group, resulting in lower payments for primary care physicians,” said Emma Freer, Senior Policy Analyst for Healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project. “So, we applaud CMS’ final 2026 Medicare physician fee schedule, which narrows the pay gap between specialty and primary care physicians and proposes to minimize AMA influence moving forward. That said, we discourage CMS from tying physician payment to participation in value-based payment models, which provide less care at higher cost to taxpayers than fee-for-service models.”

CMS’ final rule heeds comments submitted by Economic Liberties in response to its proposal. Specifically, we applauded CMS for taking steps to improve Medicare physician payment policy. We also urged CMS to build on this progress by increasing payment for primary care services and abandoning value-based payment models, like Medicare Advantage, that divert finite taxpayer dollars away from high-quality care delivery to Big Medicine middlemen.

Read “Medicare Advantage and Vertical Consolidation in Health Care” here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here. 

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.