Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the final Medicare physician fee schedule for 2017, which begins implementation of the long overdue overhaul of California’s outdated geographic payment localities.

The California Geographic Practice Cost Index (GPCI) fix will update California’s Medicare physician payment regions and raise payment levels for 14 urban California counties misclassified as rural, while holding the remaining rural counties permanently harmless (starting in 2018) from cuts.

All California payment localities will transition to Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The transition to the new localities starts next year, with higher payments being phased in over a six-year period, from 2017-2022.

Unfortunately, the GPCI malpractice expenses and rent expenses went down in California and many other regions of the country. This means that most California physicians will experience an overall GPCI rate reduction in 2017. The general GPCI cut would have been larger if the California GPCI fix was not being simultaneously enacted. 

Click here to see the net GPCI payment impact by region.

Contact: Elizabeth McNeil, (800) 786-4262 or emcneil@cmadocs.org.