ASE Joins Letter of Support for the Senate Provider Reimbursement Stability Act

On August 7, ASE joined the Alliance of Specialty Medicine in a letter to Senators Boozman, Marshall, Tillis, Welch, King, and Shaheen expressing support for S. 5180, the Provider Reimbursement Stability Act. The letter urges Congress to modernize the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule’s budget neutrality mechanism, pointing to ongoing disruption from CMS’s 2021 and 2023 E/M relative value increases, the two-decade lag in updating clinical labor prices, and utilization projections that overestimate use of new codes like G2211 and TCM services without returning the resulting savings through the conversion factor.

ASE supports this effort because unstable Medicare reimbursement threatens echocardiography practices’ ability to maintain the equipment, staff, and financial footing needed to serve Medicare patients. As payment has failed to keep pace with inflation, practices nationwide have been forced to limit Medicare patients, consolidate with larger systems, or close entirely, all of which put access to cardiac imaging services at risk.