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Social Security started mailing notices this week to Medicare patients whose eligibility it cannot confirm under a new federal law. For some of them, coverage can end on February 1, 2027. The patient may not tell your front desk. The eligibility response will. Here is what changed, who it reaches, and five checks to run before February.
Every physician, practitioner and supplier has until December 31, 2026 to decide whether to participate in Medicare for 2027. Most practices let the date pass, and their status rolls over for another year. That is a real decision with a 5 percent payment difference attached, and it locks on January 1. Here is what each status means on a claim, and five checks to run before the window closes.
CMS has finalized a rule that removes the last Medicare revocation grounds with a forward-looking start date. From January 2027, a revocation for a missed enrollment update reaches back to the day after the update was due, and that includes a new billing company, bank account or managing employee. The rule sits inside the home health payment rule, so many physician practices have not seen it.
Starting January 1, 2027, Medicare requires two new modifiers on certain telehealth claims. Modifiers BB and BC do not change payment, so they are easy to miss. The right answer depends on your platform contracts and who supervises the visit, and CMS has not yet answered every question. Here is what to check before January.
CMS issued the CY 2027 Medicare physician fee schedule final rule on November 4, 2026. It takes effect for services on or after January 1, 2027. The conversion factor goes down, the G2211 add-on code becomes a modifier, and same-day visits with minor procedures are paid less. Here is what to change in your billing before the new year.
CMS Change Request 14616 tells every Medicare Administrative Contractor to post its Targeted Probe and Educate (TPE) results each quarter, with at least the three most common denial reasons for each topic it reviews. It took effect on November 2, 2026. For a practice, that list is a free preview of what an auditor will look for.
CMS Change Request 14603 says Medicare is the primary payer, ahead of the Federal Employees Health Benefits plan, for a federal annuitant who also receives federal workers' compensation. It applies to dates of service from November 2, 2026. If your front desk bills the FEHB plan first for these patients, the claims will go to the wrong payer.
A Medicare claim must reach the Medicare contractor no later than one calendar year after the date of service. For visits in November and December 2025, that date falls in November and December 2026. A claim that misses it is denied, the denial cannot be appealed, and the patient cannot be billed for it.
Every Medicare-enrolled physician and group must revalidate its enrollment, usually every five years. Miss the date and Medicare can stop paying. If billing privileges are deactivated, Medicare pays nothing for the services in between, and the reactivation does not reach back to cover them.
While a Medicare patient is in a covered Part A skilled nursing facility stay, the facility is paid for almost everything the patient receives. Your office can still bill its professional services, but the technical part of an x-ray or other test belongs to the facility. Bill it to Medicare and it is denied or taken back.
While a Medicare patient is under a home health plan of care, only the home health agency can be paid for outpatient therapy and certain supplies. A physician office that bills those services gets a denial, or a recoupment months later, and it shows as the practice's loss.
On October 8, CMS and the CDC proposed the first broad update to the CLIA lab rules since 2023, and several changes would lighten the load on physician office labs. Comments close December 7. None of it changes how Medicare pays for an in-office test: every lab claim is still checked against the certificate your office holds.
Medicare's annual election period runs from October 15 to December 7, and every change made in it takes effect on January 1. Patients rarely tell the front desk. The first January visit is then billed to last year's payer, and a patient in the middle of treatment can be told to start an authorization over when the plan rules say otherwise.
CMS spent the last two weeks asking practices to talk to Medicare patients about breast and prostate cancer screening, and to check when each patient is next eligible. Medicare measures that interval in whole months after the month of the last test, not in days. Book a screening one week too early and the claim is denied; if no ABN was signed, the practice cannot bill the patient.
From October 1, 2026, federal Medicaid funding for many noncitizens ends, and that includes the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary program. CMS reminded practices today: a patient who leaves the QMB group loses the cost-sharing protection, but only from that date. Every earlier date of service stays protected.
CMS has rewritten the appeals chapter of its Medicare claims manual, effective December 11, 2026. The policy is unchanged, but the rules on late appeals are now plain: a physician practice gets good cause in two narrow situations, and a billing company that missed the date is never one of them.
CMS has told Medicare contractors to keep charging 11.875% interest on overpayments from October 21, 2026. Interest starts on day 31 after a demand letter and keeps running during an appeal. For a practice holding a disputed demand, the cost of waiting is now easy to work out.
Solo practitioners and practices with 10 or fewer MIPS eligible clinicians can combine with other small practices and be scored as one virtual group for the 2027 performance year. CMS opened the election on October 1, and it closes December 31, 2026. Once made, the choice holds for the whole year, and everyone in the group shares one score.
CMS has set the 2027 dollar thresholds for Medicare appeals: $200 for a hearing before an administrative law judge and $2,000 for federal court, from January 1, 2027. The numbers barely moved. What decides most practice appeals is earlier: the 30-, 60- and 120-day clocks, and whether small denials are grouped so they can reach a judge at all.
CMS used its October 15, 2026 MLN Connects newsletter to tell optometrists to bill nursing facility services correctly. Behind the reminder is an OIG audit in which all 399 high-level nursing facility visits billed by 15 optometrists failed Medicare's rules. Any eye-care practice that sends clinicians into nursing homes should check its own claims now.
CPT 2027 replaces global maternity billing with separate reporting for prenatal care, labor, delivery and postpartum care. UnitedHealthcare's October 2026 commercial bulletin is one of the first payer notices to say how to bill a pregnancy that starts in 2026 and ends in 2027. Practices that deliver babies have about eleven weeks to set up their own rules.
CMS has finalized the Global Benchmark for Efficient Drug Pricing (GLOBE) Model. Drug makers pay the rebates, but practices that buy and bill Part B drugs will see the effect at the front desk and in posting: from April 1, 2027, some Original Medicare patients will owe less coinsurance on certain drugs, and Medicare will pay the practice more. Which patients depends on where they live.
Insights
A federal Medicaid rule takes effect in 2027, but its first revenue-cycle test will happen at check-in. Practices need a controlled way to verify coverage, route exceptions, and follow changes before they become denials or patient balances.
Prior authorization, NCCI bundling edits and payer AI are converging on claims at once in 2026. Here is the three-force breakdown, and the prevention plan that stops all three before they become denials.
CMS-0057-F was supposed to simplify prior authorization. Instead it made data-field precision mandatory, and independent practices are absorbing a 31% denial spike. Here is the PA-first workflow that stops it.
Payers now use AI to scan clinical notes before a claim ever reaches a human. Reactive denial management cannot keep up, so here is what fighting AI with AI actually looks like.
56% of denials trace back to patient eligibility, not coding. Here is why continuous verification, not better coding, is the fastest lever on your clean claim rate in 2026.
Median days in A/R have stretched past 52 days industry-wide. Here is why prevention, not faster follow-up, is the only way to get practices back under 30.
66% of practices now outsource all or part of their revenue cycle. Here is how to avoid becoming a ticket number, and the five questions that separate a partner from a vendor.
288 new CPT codes took effect January 1, 2026. Here is what changed in the CMS fee schedule, why most practices fall behind, and how to capture the new revenue without inviting an audit.
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