WASHINGTON — Doctors are staring down a cut to their Medicare pay next year, and while the news has united them in outrage, it’s also turned one specialty against another.

Medicare officials last week announced its major annual update to the way the program pays physicians. Along with other changes, it includes a policy that will boost payments to specialties that rely on evaluating and managing patients, as opposed to those that focus on procedures. But in Medicare, boosting payments in one area almost always means cutting them somewhere else. So to pay for that, doctors across the country will see a roughly 3% cut to a factor that determines how much Medicare pays them for caring for seniors.

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The change has pitted certain specialties against primary care doctors. A host of surgeons’ groups, including the American College of Surgeons, plainly criticized family physicians in a recent letter to Medicare, saying there’s no “valid justification” for the boost and calling it an “inappropriate” overpayment.

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