Advocacy

Medicare pays physicians less today than it did in 2001.

Not less after inflation. Less in plain dollars. The conversion factor — the single number every Medicare physician payment is multiplied by — was $38.26 in 2001 and is $32.35 in 2025. That is −15.5% before adjusting for anything.

Over the same period the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family coverage reached $26,993, of which the worker pays $6,850. Premiums rose 26% in the last five years alone. When KFF last measured the full stretch back to 2001, family premiums had already risen 113% by 2011.

Two things moved in opposite directions for twenty-four years. Whatever is driving premium growth, the rate Medicare pays a physician is not it — that rate went down.

Dashed because the path between the two years was not a straight line — the rate was cut and patched repeatedly. Both endpoints are as published by CMS.

The figures, with sources

Every number on this page is a primary source you can open. Nothing here is modelled, projected or adjusted by us.

Medicare physician payment

Figure	Year	Value	Source
Medicare physician conversion factor	2001	$38.2581	CMS — CY2001 Physician Fee Schedule final rule, Federal Register · read 2026-08-10
Medicare physician conversion factor	2025	$32.35	CMS — CY2025 Physician Fee Schedule final rule · read 2026-08-10

Employer-sponsored family coverage

Figure	Year	Value	Source
Average annual family premium, employer-sponsored	2025	$26,993	KFF — 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey · read 2026-08-10
Worker share of the family premium	2025	$6,850	KFF — 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey · read 2026-08-10
Cumulative rise in family premiums, 2020–2025	2025	+26%	KFF — 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey · read 2026-08-10
Rise in family premiums, 2001–2011	2011	+113%	KFF — 2011 Employer Health Benefits Survey · read 2026-08-10

How the −15.5% is calculated: $32.35 ÷ $38.2581 − 1 = −15.44%, rounded to one decimal. Both figures are nominal — the actual rates as published, with no inflation adjustment applied. Adjusted for inflation the decline is far larger, which is a stronger claim and one we will publish when the BLS series is sourced here rather than asserted.

What this page does not yet claim

Listed rather than left out, because the gaps in an argument are the first thing a good opponent looks for:

Insurer net income, 2001 and 2025 — needs the figures read out of each company’s own 10-K rather than a secondary chart.
CPI-U annual averages for the full period — needs the BLS historical series, so the real-terms decline can be stated as well as the nominal one.
Physician-reported compensation and contract terms from DocBlind, which is the only part of this argument nobody else can make.

Whose argument this is

The comparison on this page is not ours. It was assembled and published by Adam Bruggeman, MD — an orthopaedic surgeon in San Antonio and chair of the AAOS Advocacy Council — together with IndeMed, the independent-physician advocacy organisation. They did the work of noticing that these two lines run in opposite directions and of putting it in front of physicians.

What this page adds is durability. Their version circulates as an image, which means it cannot be checked, cannot be dated, and cannot be updated when next year’s figures land. So we rebuilt every number from the primary source rather than reproducing their graphic, and put the citation next to each one. Same argument, in a form a legislative staffer can verify in two clicks.

We have no affiliation with Dr Bruggeman or IndeMed, and neither has endorsed this page. If either would rather we linked to their work than restated it, or wants a correction, we will do that.

Use it

Cite it, send it, put it in front of a legislator. If you find an error in any figure, tell us and we will correct it and say that we did — a number nobody can check is worth nothing, and a number that turns out to be wrong and stays up is worth less than nothing.

MD-Universe is a network of NPI-verified physicians. The next version of this page will carry something no public dataset contains: what physicians themselves report about their contracts and compensation, in aggregate.