[1] President Barack Obama signed a bill into law on April 16, 2015, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which ended use of the SGR.
The report also included a conversion factor that would change the payments for physician services for the next year in order to match the target SGR.
The implementation of the physician fee schedule update to meet the target SGR could be suspended or adjusted by Congress, as was done regularly (this was referred to as a doc fix).
The update was calculated using two factors: The MEI measured the weighted average price change for various inputs involved with producing physicians’ services.
[9] On June 25, 2010, President Obama signed the Preservation of Access to Care for Medicare Beneficiaries and Pension Relief Act of 2010 that not only delayed implementation of the conversion factor until December 1, 2010, but also increased reimbursements by 2.2%.
On December 16, 2010, President Obama signed the Medicare and Medicaid Extenders Act of 2010 into law, delaying the implementation of the SGR until January 1, 2012.
[11] When President Obama signed the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 on February 22, 2012, the implementation of the conversion factor was again delayed until January 1, 2013, when the cut was estimated to be 27.4%.
[12][13][14] Congress passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 on January 1, 2013, which stated in section 601 that the conversion factor for 2013 "shall be zero percent.