State Budget Passes with $100 Million in Benefits to NY Physicians
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Colleagues:
The state budget passed this week with numerous problematic items removed from the final version. That adds up to $100 million in benefits to NY physicians—a wonderful ROI for your MSSNY dues.
The New York State Legislature this week gave final approval to the nine bills consisting of thousands of pages that comprise the $254 billion state budget for the 2025-26 state fiscal year. Importantly, the final state budget includes a new $50 million for enhancements to physician Medicaid reimbursements, as part of an effort to increase Medicaid payments across the health care spectrum, through the new MCO tax enacted last year.
Equally important, the final budget EXCLUDED numerous proposals under serious discussion that had been STRONGLY OPPOSED by MSSNY together with several allies, including proposals that would have:
- Required the 16,000 physicians with Excess Medical Malpractice Insurance coverage to pay 50% of the cost of the coverage, which would have imposed $40 million in new costs on these physicians.
- Eliminated the right of physicians to appeal underpayments from Medicaid Managed Care plans to New York’s Independent Dispute Resolution system.
- Permitted numerous physician assistants to practice without appropriate physician supervision.
- Eliminated the important review role played by county medical societies in approving physicians to participate in the Workers Compensation program.
- Eliminated the funding source for MSSNY’s Committee for Physicians’ Health program.
It should be noted that, as part of an effort to increase the availability of involuntary commitment as an option when someone has a serious mental illness that is “likely to cause serious harm” to themselves or others, the final budget did contain a provision that had been opposed by the New York State Psychiatric Association and MSSNY to permit a psychiatric nurse practitioner to be one of the two examiners to certify a patient for involuntary commitment.
We thank all the physicians and county medical society leaders who took the time to meet with their legislators, send a letter or post a tweet on these many items. These grassroots efforts were critically important to supplement the extensive work of MSSNY’s advocacy team in conjunction with specialty societies and other allies.
As always, these policy “wins” are temporary as proposals rejected one year can come back the next. Furthermore, with uncertainty at the federal level regarding potential steep Congressional cuts to New York’s Medicaid program, it is possible that the State Legislature and Governor may need to adopt amendments to this budget later this year to address these funding gaps.
And finally, I want to thank MSSNY’s Senior Vice-President and Chief Legislative Counsel Moe Auster and MSSNY’s entire Governmental Affairs team for their tireless efforts in advocating for New York physicians and for providing this good news summary of the final budget.
We have so much more work to do. Please support our MSSNYPAC. And if you are not already a member, please join MSSNY.
All the best,
David Jakubowicz, MD, FACS
MSSNY President
