AMA Report: Medicare Physician Spending Fell Sharply During First Half of 2020; Telehealth Spending Up
By Joey Berlin

 AMA Health Spending Report_Chart.600x400

Thanks to the early shutting down and shutting in prompted by COVID-19, spending on Medicare physician services fell as much as 57% short of expected levels during April 2020, and nearly one-fifth below expected spending over the first six months of that year. Nevertheless, telehealth spending spiked.

That’s according to a recent American Medical Association report analyzing a sample of claims data for the first half of both 2019 and 2020.

After updating the analysis with impacts through September 2020, AMA found Medicare spending rebounded in the third quarter of the year but still was short of expected spending at the end of September. Meanwhile, spending in Texas fell 14% during the first nine months of last year, AMA found.

The analysis, “Change in Medicare Physician Spending During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” compared spending in 2020 with trends before the pandemic began. AMA found that Medicare physician fee schedule spending dropped sharply in mid-March 2020, reaching its nadir during the week ending April 10, 2020, when physicians logged $845 million in allowed charges – 57% below the expected spending figure of nearly $2 billion.

Through June 2020, spending was 19% lower than expected but rebounded from July through September, settling in at 8% short of what was expected in the final week of September.

For the entire period between January and September 2020, spending was 16% less than expected.

Other 2020 findings in the report:

  • Physician specialties that had some of the highest reductions through September included otolaryngology (25%), ophthalmology (22%), allergy/immunology and cardiac surgery (20% each), dermatology (19%). and emergency medicine (18%).
  • Telehealth spending was less than 0.1% of total physician fee schedule spending before the pandemic, but rose to 16% of spending in April 2020. From July through September, telehealth accounted for 5.2% of all spending.
  • Of the $3 billion in telehealth spending between January and September, almost half was on established patient office visits. Phone calls accounted for 19%, and mental/behavioral health services made up 16%.

AMA’s update includes three questions to consider for the future: What impacts will these utilization changes have on Medicare patients’ health? When will spending and utilization return to prepandemic levels? And could “pent-up” demand bring a surge in utilization after the public health emergency ends?

Last Updated On

June 17, 2021

Originally Published On

May 07, 2021

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