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08/24/2026
The “Limiting Medicare Coverage of Certain Individuals” section of the proposed 2027 Medicare physician fee schedule explains how CMS will enforce a 2025 law that removes some Medicare beneficiaries from the rolls based on immigration status as soon as February 2027. If you have patients affected by this, you may not hear that their services are not covered by Medicare until after they’ve been cut — and it’s not clear that your charges on those patients will be allowed.
08/24/2026
Start the countdown: Beginning Jan. 1, 2027, services for antepartum care, labor management, delivery and postpartum care will be coded separately. The old global approach to billing obstetric care was intended to simplify billing, but it no longer reflects the variation and complexity of care across the phases of pregnancy.
08/24/2026
Ever since the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) was introduced, its purpose has been clear: to capture the reason for a patient’s visit across all health care settings. As outlined in the first paragraph of the ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting, diagnosis coding is intended to describe the patient’s condition using terminology that “includes specific diagnoses as well as symptoms, problems, and reasons for the encounter.”
08/24/2026
Deciding whether to use modifier 50 (Bilateral procedure) or modifiers LT/RT (Left side/right side) requires a little forethought and sometimes homework. Still, in 2024, the most recent year of available Medicare figures, it appears providers didn’t do too badly — though some codes proved more of a challenge.

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